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New Lanark
Guylaine Spencer
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"Oooh, did you see many castles?" friends ask when they learn I went to Scotland this summer. I tell them yes, but what really stuck in my mind were the restored homes, school rooms and workplaces of factory hands at the New Lanark World Heritage Site.
A cotton mill and company town may seem like an odd choice for a UNESCO World Heritage designation, but the four hundred thousand visitors who come here every year vouch for its appeal.
The first thing that makes New Lanark special is its idyllic location. As unlikely as it sounds, this remnant of the industrial revolution lies in a valley of beech and Scots pine alongside the River Clyde. Long before the mill was built, the nearby Falls of Clyde were famous. Romantic souls like Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth and J.W. Turner came to admire them. To artists, the falls provided inspiration, but to business men David Dale and Richard Arkwright, they represented a different type of energy. The enormous potential of water power to drive machines convinced these two men to open one of the first cotton mills in Scotland in 1786. It soon became the largest mill in the country.
The fame of New Lanark is in large part due to its second owner, Robert Owen, who managed both the mills and its planned community from 1800 to 1825. More than just an entrepreneur, Owen was a vocal and often controversial advocate of social change. Although he ran the mills for a profit –and a good one, at that—he also experimented with social reform. He phased out child labour for those under the age of ten, started an employee sick fund, improved workers’ homes, and opened a store selling goods at wholesale prices that became the inspiration for the Co-operative Movement. He also founded Britain’s first school for infants.
Owen sold the mills in 1825, but they continued to operate until 1968. The story of New Lanark's restoration is a rags-to-riches tale worthy of a Victorian novel. After years of dereliction followed by determined restoration, the village now looks very much the way it did back in the 1820s. The property consists of about twenty buildings including three former mills, a garden and a picnic area near the Falls of Clyde footpath.
With its handsome, uniform appearance, New Lanark reminded me more of a modern upscale townhouse community than a former factory town. I began my tour at the Visitor Centre, where I purchased a "passport" that gave me entry to other buildings on the site. The reception area is housed in an impressive Georgian-style structure. Like others in the village, it boasts walls of local sandstone and a roof of Scotch slate. Contrasting detailing around the door and window openings give it a finished, elegant look. In the 1800s, this building housed the Institute for the Formation of Character, which provided evening classes for adults and day school for infants. Over the years, it was also used for dances and lectures and religious services. Today it provides exhibit and conference space.
Next door is the Victorian Engine House. Here I took a few moments to admire the working steam engine—state-of-the-art technology for the 1880s. Although it’s not original to the site, this engine is similar to one that was used here. I then crossed a covered ramp into Mill 3 and entered “The New Millennium Experience”, which combines a somewhat corny ski-lift apparatus with photos and videos simulating a time-travel journey with a young girl called Harmony from the year 2200. She talks about Robert Owen and his efforts to improve the lot of children and factory workers. She also hints at hope for the future.
It was on Level 4 of Mill 3 where I really started to get a sense of New Lanark’s past. Here I found a huge working 19th century spinning mule, a machine designed for making fine yarn. It took up the length of one long wall. Watching this monstrous contraption and listening to its clatter, I tried to imagine what it must have been like when this building was full of three or four hundred workers, all busily immersed in mostly monotonous tasks. I pictured barefoot workers – many of them women and children – feebly trying to brush away fluffs of cotton sticking to their skin in the 80 degree heat. In my mind’s eye I could see children crawling under the dangerous-looking machines to pick up fallen scraps. Despite Owen’s good intentions and the praise that so many wealthy visitors had for his mills, I couldn’t see anything utopian about this mill from the worker’s point of view.
At their peak the mills of New Lanark employed around 2,000 hands including 500 children. In the early days of industrialization, before unions and governments forced improvements in wages and working conditions, factory jobs were the last refuge of the desperate. Only the poorest would apply—refugees from the Highland clearances, immigrants from Ireland, women and children. New Lanark's isolated location made it even harder to attract and keep workers. In order to meet the demand for labor, Dale, the founder of New Lanark, contracted with workhouses in Glasgow and Edinburgh to take on orphans as apprentices. In exchange for thirteen hours of hard labor every day except Sunday, the children, many as young as five years of age, received food, clothing and dormitory-type shelter but no wages. In addition, the offspring of workers often joined their parents in the factory. Wages were so low that many families needed the income of their children just to survive.
When Dale’s son-in-law Robert Owen took over the operation, the physical and mental degradation of many of his young employees appalled him. Although Dale had provided schooling for children in improvised rooms in the mills, the young ones were usually too tired to learn and fell asleep at their desks. Owen gradually phased out the apprenticeship system and insisted that children under the age of ten would attend school full-time. To underline his intent, he constructed the first purpose-built mill schools in the country.
Children from one to five years attended the infant school in the Institute for the Formation of Character. Older students attended classes in Robert Owen’s School for Children. Day classes were held here from 1817 to 1876, when the Parish Board transferred the mill children to a public school just up the road. Owen's school taught history, geography, arithmetic, reading, writing, art and nature study which involved field trips to the nearby woods. The children also learned dancing, singing and military drills, often impressing visitors with their performances – at least until 1825 when parish school inspectors forced the school to abolish singing and dancing and replace it with catechism.
The original schoolroom, a large open space on the second floor, has been restored to the 1820s era.It is high-ceilinged, bright and cheerful, and decorated with paintings of animals, maps, and a giant globe nineteen feet in circumference. A gallery at one end was used by an orchestra during music and dance classes and by curious visitors who came to see Mr. Owen's "experiment in human happiness". In the classroom, I watched a video starring a kind schoolmaster who explains the gentle art of teaching at New Lanark in the early 1800s.
In another room in the school I saw a film about a mill girl from the 1820s. Annie McLeod is a ghostly character who appears on the screen as a 3D hologram and shares her thoughts and feelings about what it was like to work in the mills as well as information about working class family life circa the 1820s.
In the film, Annie refers to the manager's home as “the house with more rooms than people” – about a dozen, in this case. This building is now known as Robert Owen's House even though Owen and his family only lived here from 1800 to 1808, after which he moved to a larger house on the outskirts of the village. Later, senior company managers occupied the home. Servants' quarters are in the basement, which also features an exhibit about Owen's later social experiments in the United States. In a room on the main floor, I watched a video about Owen. Like the other educational material at the site, it was easy to follow, and entertaining as well as informative and inspiring.
This comfortable but far from ostentatious upper-middle-class home suddenly looked like a mansion in contrast when I made my way over to the restored Millworkers' Housing. There are two units on display, one from the 1820s and one from the 1930s. The older one consists of a single spartan room roughly 12 by 10 feet with cooking facilities and a two-level "hurley bed."
Often as many as ten family members crowded into this space which today would barely hold the belongings of the average university student. The lack of privacy is as disturbing to the modern mind as the lack of indoor toilets. The unit from 1930s is bigger with a kitchen and bedroom, and boasts electric light, a radio and an indoor washroom on the staircase that would have been shared with residents across the hall. If this was “superior” worker accommodation for the times, I’d hate to see how the majority lived back then.
Perhaps we're lucky to be spared a display of the dormitories which housed the orphan employees. The building that once sheltered them, the “Nursery Buildings” (a name full of pathos), now houses the Village Stores. One room is set up to look like a store from the 1820s and features a display about the Cooperative Movement. The other room mimics a shop of the 1920s. Here you can buy old-fashioned candy, post-cards showing early advertising and booklets about the New Lanark site.
Nearby is the handsome Counting House and Caithness Row, which was converted into two- and three-bedroom apartments with modern interiors back in the 1960s. The proof that New Lanark is not just a museum piece but a real living community was evident in the flapping lines of laundry snapping in the wind behind the town homes the day I visited. Today nearly 200 persons live in the village in 65 apartments (45 rented non-profit units and 20 owner-occupied) spread out among several buildings.
Visitors wanting to get a taste of what it's like to live here today have two choices: the owner's option and the worker's option. If you're flush with cash then you can stay at the New Lanark Hotel, which is located in the renovated Mill Number One. There are also self-catering apartments for short-term rent nearby. If you're on the other side of the social divide, however, you can rent a bed in the New Lanark Hostel which is located in Wee Row, one of the former workers' housing units, for a fraction of the cost. As I only had one day at New Lanark, I didn’t have the chance to sample either one. However, even one day left me with ample food for thought.
One of the things that I like best about this place is the balance it gives to our usual picture of the "good old days". Most heritage sites – the castles, mansions, even the great art galleries and museums – show us how the wealthy minority lived in the past; seldom do we glimpse the reality of the majority. New Lanark helps fill in the blurry background of our landscape of the past. However, it also calls on us to examine the present.
How many people today suffer worse conditions than those endured by 19th century workers? In “The New Millennium Experience” our guide Harmony asks: “Did you know that at the beginning of your 21st Century, in some countries, there are still very young children working in factories. A lot of people are trying to change that…and they will succeed in the end, believe me.” Her optimism, like Robert Owen's, is inspiring. And inspiration – well, hasn't that been this region’s role since visitors flocked to the Falls of Clyde back in the 18th century? Spinning cotton yarn, it seems, isn't the only New Lanark tradition. Another one is spinning dreams and making them come true.
Guylaine Spencer is a writer based in Ontario, Canada, whose
work has appeared in Americas, 50Plus, International Living,
and other publications.
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