CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 13 WORLD HERITAGE SITES Scotland; Pontcysyllte Aqueduct,Wales; Saltaire, England; and Jodrell Bank, England. While the Lake District also contains some industrial heritage, it was inscribed as a world heritage site as a cultural landscape for its harmonious mountain landscape, shaped by a particular land use and farming system. There are very many other places in the UK with strong claims to connections with industry and technology, including Liverpool (sadly deleted as a world heritage site by Unesco1), the Stockton and Darlington Railway (the world’s first), and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (the first modern intercity railway). Other sites with a strong industrial revolution component are waiting to be considered for the UK’s tentative list of world heritage sites, including Birkenhead Park (a critical early example of a public park) and Port Sunlight (a model village). Both these places are examples of pioneering developments designed to mitigate and compensate for the worst excesses of industrialism, by injecting new green space and designing new suburban garden city developments. Both have had a huge impact on the development of town planning throughout the world. The only comprehensive review of UK sites was carried out by World Heritage UK in 2019. It briefly noted the importance of industrial heritage: ‘A large part of the world heritage site collection relates to sites that reflect preindustrial town and landscape planning, the impact of the industrial revolution and the environmental mitigation of its worst effects, often through town planning and the creation of model communities. Many of these sites resonate with Britain’s global role as a great power and shaper of world events, especially through the British Empire, the industrial revolution and the export of ideas for town planning and environmental management…They are of central importance in understanding Britain’s island story.’2 However, the review did not specifically carry the issue forward into its recommendations. By common consent Britain was the first industrial nation. The industrial revolution was the most fundamental transformation of human life in history, arguably the greatest sea-change in history since the advent of agriculture. Technology became the main agent of economic and social change, and for a brief period all this coincided with the history of Britain. First into the experience, there was no external guidance, and the British had to evolve new mechanisms (social, technical and legislative) to support the growth of industry, while managing the worst excesses of headlong growth and industrial society. In Eric Hobsbawm’s words: ‘An entire world economy was built on or rather around Britain, and the country therefore temporarily rose to an unparalleled position of global influence and power... There was a moment in the history of the world where Britain can be described, if we are not pedantic, as its only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor, and for that reason its only naval power and the only one which had a genuine world policy.’³ Following Britain’s example, many countries not yet industrialised set about creating industrialisation by decree. Britain, by contrast, had seen an industrial revolution by general agreement. In the words of Peter Mathias: ‘Britain saw an industrial revolution by consent. It owed nothing to planners and nothing to policemen.’⁴ In Britain, the state did not aim to drive change or shape development, or to act as counter to the social and environmental problems unleashed by industrialisation, although later it simply had to assume these roles. In many senses all nations seeking economic growth in the 20th and 21st centuries are following the path Britain pioneered in the 18th century. It follows that the sites most closely associated with this process assume national and international status, whether or not they are world heritage sites. It is sometimes thought that the industrial revolution proceeded purely on the basis of craft skills among uneducated workers. There is doubtless some truth in this. Yet, as Joel Mokyr argues, the relative importance of science to the productive economy kept growing through the late-18th and 19th centuries.⁵ After 1870, science and technology became indispensable, as evidenced in partnerships between scientists and industrialists, and most dramatically in the growth and development of scientific institutions: the religious dissenters’ academies, which provided the skills needed for the first phase Penrhyn Slate Quarry in the Slate Landscape of North West Wales World Heritage Site (Photo: Crown copyright, RCAHMW) 1 See Dave Chetwyn and Ian Wray (2021) ‘What was Unesco up to in Liverpool?’ Context 170, December ² World Heritage UK (2019) UK World Heritage: an asset for the future ³ Eric Hobsbawm (1969) Industry and Empire, Pelican Books ⁴ Peter Mathias (1983) The First Industrial Nation: an economic history of Britain, 1700– 1914, Routledge ⁵ Joel Mokyr (2009) The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850, Yale University Press
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