London as a manufacturing place

Was London a manufacturing anomaly ? There were no raw materials, no coal and the weather didn't favour weaving. Yet, it was the centre of power. The rich wanted beautiful things and Londoners made them. Skills emerged and developed, which attracted more skills. Above all it was the major port.

The Thames offered a wonderful entry and exit point for London and had done since Roman times. In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river.

The dock area was extended and trade boomed. The city and its surroundings attracted a vast variety of commercial activity.

A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense – 13,200 houses were burned to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches. Rebuilding the housing took well into the 1670s. The public buildings took longer – St Paul’s was not considered finished till 1711. Rebuilding was at a much-reduced density – some parish churches and livery company halls were never replaced and only around 9,000 houses filled the place of those lost. No more the narrow streets with closely packed thatched dwellings. We can thank Christopher Wren for the fine stone churches built in the classical style that can still be seen amongst the glass and steel of the 21st century city.

By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over. It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries and ships stores, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Much later, Joseph Rank saw the vast quantity of grain imports coming through London docks and saw the opportunity for flour mills which he built by the river. These worked alongside huge warehouses and markets. London had cornered world trade, for example Australian wool was shipped to London for onward sale. The domination in trade was mirrored and amplified in banking and finance where London took an unassailable lead until 1914.

The 18th century and earlier

Inner London

Where it all began with trade. Wool and silk occupied many Londoners as did clock-making and furniture. England’s population in 1651 is estimated at 5 million and mid-century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. Follow this link to discover more.

East London

Docklands and the East End. Trade needed ships and London built many. When I think of shipbuilding, I see in my minds eye the North-East or the Clyde. Yet, Thames shipyards, including four Naval Dockyards, built many thousands of ships over four centuries. We can think of East Indiamen setting sail for the spices of the east, or whalers, but more-so mail steamers, wherries and tea clippers. It was said that standing on Greenwich Hill you could see hundreds of yards stretching west to Chiswick and east towards the sea. With men like Maudslay, Thames yards were ahead of the game with steam power until the proximity of raw materials passed the advantage further north. Along with ships, London made armaments at Woolwich. Follow this link to discover more and this link to the Thames shipbuilders.

South London

Tanning by the Thames created a stink. Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The River Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughterhouses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the cordwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by lower prices through lower wages. Flour and beer nourished the population. Huguenots produced more fine silk. Follow this link to discover more.

19th and 20th century

East London

With yet more trade, the docks expanded. Furniture making spread with the influx of skilled Jewish makers. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in the words of Gerry White ‘something approaching one giant factory’. Other industries gathered further along the Thames. Read more in this link.

South London

Engineers made a bee-line for Lambeth to learn from the pioneer machine-tool maker, Henry Maudslay. In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. Pharmaceuticals transformed lives, much loved toys delighted generations and the Stanley knife! The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. Read more in this link.

Inner London

Pianos were made in Islington. Mornington Crescent was home to the 'Black Cat' Carreras cigarettes factory built in an Egyptian style and later sold to Rothmans which manufactured in Darlington. Benson & Hedges were made in Oxford Street before production moved to Ballymena. Lambert and Butler were produced in Drury Lane. There were bicycle makers in Holborn and jewellers around Fitzrovia. Holborn was also home to George Kent and his household equipment including his famous knife cleaner. Burroughs Wellcome set up offices in Snow Hill, Holborn in the late 19th century. and then many of the basic needs of life. Many of the new industries were born in Inner London before they moved out to pastures new. Read more in this link.

North London

Manufacturing moved north from Inner London and there developed a raft of different industries from electronics to aircraft, furniture to motor components. Brimsdown, Enfield was the former home of the Edison Swan Laboratory. Joseph Swan moved from Newcastle where he developed the incandescent lamp and joined with the American Thomas Edison in exploiting their invention at Ponders End in 1886. They manufactured under the Mazda brand. I write of Edison in this blog. Working with him, Ambrose Fleming invented the first thermionic valve, a diode, from which the development of wireless grew. Also in Brimsdown was Cosmos, valve manufacturers. Read more in this link.

West London

American companies flocked to Western Avenue and the Great West Road. Our iconic aircraft were built in Kingston and then radar to spot their enemies. Addlestone became home to Plessey Radar after its takeover of Decca in the mid sixties. The marine radar part of the Decca was taken over by Racal and they had a manufacturing presence in New Maldon. New Malden is also home to BAE Systems visualisation, experimentation, and design. Sunbeam Talbot made motor cars in Ladbroke Hall (post image) Read more in this link.

Postscript

In his London in the Twentieth Century, a phrase from Jerry White stuck in my mind. ‘From the middle of the sixties London’s manufacturing industry virtually bled away, along with the port that fed it.’ He offers some telling figures: between 1959 and 1974 London lost 38% of its manufacturing jobs so by 1996 only 10% of the London workforce was employed in manufacturing.' A good deal of manufacturing moved to the north, east, west and south of London and in due course out to Metroland and into the South East.

South London manufacturing history

 The south bank of the Thames and the rivers flowing into it, the Wandle and Neckinger, attracted industries needing ready transport for raw materials, water power and water itself.

Southwark, Lambeth and Bermondsey

Ceramics were made in Lambeth and also in Chelsea and Bow. Doulton & Co made rainwater goods and later fine pottery as Royal Doulton having moved to Stoke on Trent.

Glass was famously produced in Southwark and over the river at Whitefriars in the City of London. Around about one quarter of Britain's glass works were in London. I write of early British glass making in this link.

Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The river Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughter houses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the Corwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by virtue of its lower pay rates.

Leading on from tanning were furriers and a trade in making fur hats which continued to thrive until machine made rabbit skin hats and felt hats from further north took over.

Londoners needed feeding and were thirsty people. The Albion Steam flour Mill was built in 1785 and had two of Watt's 50-horsepower steam engines driving eighty millstones and cranes, hoists, sifters and dressers. The largest of the London breweries was in Southwark. The great London breweries not only became very rich but were some of the pioneers of mass production. We can think of Samuel Whitbread, Richard Meux, Sir Benjamin Truman, Sampson Hanbury and John Perkins who brewed in Southwark. Four producers of vinegar added to everything else ensured a challenging smell for the uninitiated.

Merton and Morden

The presence of the river Wandle in Merton Abbey made the area attractive to Huguenots silk weavers. When they left, the attraction of the water for dyeing calicoes and linen with madder was recognised by Mr Leach who set up a dye works. William Morris and Liberties would follow.

Further reading:

• John Coulter, Norwood Past (London: Historical Publications, 1996)
• John Coulter, Lewisham (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994)
• An Illustrated History of Merton and Morden, Evelyn Jowett (ed.) (Merton and Morden Festival of Britain Local Committee)

Inner London manufacturing history

 London does of course reach back into Roman times if not earlier. By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

Trade

London was wealthy largely as a result of international trade which flowed through the Port of London. I write in this link of the role of merchant adventurers. The types of imports and exports reveal an astonishing variety. Fine cotton garments and indigo dye from India, tea from China, ivory from Africa, gold and silver from south America, sugar from the Caribbean. Exports were needed to exchange for these goods, so London’s craftsmen made metal items of beauty and utility. The major export though was wool.

The Thames, from early times, was home to shipbuilders and I wrote of the companies and the ships they built in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Ships were built both for trading and for warfare, and yards on the Thames built both.

In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river. The congestion would not be relieved until 1790 and I write about this when looking at East London.

The huge variety of goods traded attracted manufacturing activity.

Spitalfields

In the sixteenth century and probably long before, wool had been the backbone of the English economy. It is estimated that mid century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. I write below of later division of labour, but cloth production had seen this from early days not least with the distinction between spinning and weaving, but also dyeing and fulling and other processes. Rural areas surrounding London played their part especially with spinning.

In the late sixteenth century Margaret of Anjou encouraged silk workers to come to Spitalfields from her native Lyon and so began the English silk trade of which I wrote in my blog on Braintree.

The introduction of the knitting frame transformed the manufacture of hosiery and this mattered in eighteenth century London which had a growing middle class which was both fashion conscious and keen to display conspicuous wealth. With hosiery, the colour had to be exactly right. Much framework knitting took place in the Midlands where wage costs were lower and I write about this in my blogs on Leicester and Nottingham, but London held on to the fashionable end.

Fashion attracted retail outlets from regional manufacturers. Josiah Wedgewood set a shop in in Grosvenor Square and another in Greek Street in Soho. Matthew Boulton chose Pall Mall to display his 'buttons, buckles, saucepans, candlesticks and snuff boxes'.

Jerry White in London in the 19^th Century highlights the degree of division of labour in London manufacturing. I have positively eulogised about Birmingham’s workshop system. White suggests that London took this a stage further with the skilled making of an item broken down into a great many simple steps in which an unskilled person could be trained. These people would often work in their own home for many hours to scrape a living from truly mindless work. I wonder whether it was this that John Ruskin was critiquing when he wrote of his concerns of industrialisation in his writings on political economy, such as Unto the Last. Textiles would seem to have been a prime but far from solitary example with silk spinning and weaving carried out in Spitalfields but also garment making with the process subdivided many times over. White suggests that there were 250,000 textile workers in inner London in 1901. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the plight of textile workers in Spitalfields in the early nineteenth century. Stephen Inwood uses the term 'sweated system' to describe the division of a skill into a number of unskilled processes thereby exploiting the large number of unskilled people flocking to London in the nineteenth century. He quotes some people as suggesting that this system achieved greater productivity then the clothing industry in - say - Leeds which took advantage of machinery.

Clerkenwell and Finsbury

Richard Tames in Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past writes of the sheer diversity of manufacturers. There were book binders and makers of book binding machines, manufacturers of addressing machines and ever pointed pencils, printers who specialised in railway tickets, a gilder who specialised in book edges.

Clerkenwell had some 7,000 people working in watch making in 1790; the process becoming increasingly subdivided. Of particular interest to me, the skills of watch making developed into mathematical, optical and surgical instruments in the Strand and Fleet Street; my great grandfather made surgical instruments at No 62 The Strand for Weiss & Co. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 1,000 employees making cartridges at the Eley factory in Clerkenwell. Eley later joined 29 other companies in Nobel Industries Limited.

Furniture making for the aristocracy and growing middle class received a boost with the arrival of Huguenot and Dutch crafts men in the 1680s. Exotic woods were being imported from America and the West Indies: Walnut, rosewood, deal, satinwood, and mahogany and London became Europe's top manufacturer of fine furniture. Clerkenwell was home to Hepplewhite's furniture workshop; Chippendale had been in St Martin's Lane. Less well known but still highly skilled makers produced furniture in Mayfair for the well to do.

The growing population needed feeding and here mechanisation found a foothold in milling and brewing. Feeding the brain mattered too; William Caxton established the first printing press in Westminster in 1476. Printing and book binding prospered in the environs of Fleet Street.

Further reading

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)
• Richard Tames, Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past (London: Historical Publications, 1999)
• The Finsbury Story (London: Pyramid Press, 1960)
• John Richardson, A History of Camden (London: Historical Publications, 2000)

Stockport manufacturing history

 Stockport was a cotton town which perhaps embraced progress more readily than some others. Traditional spinning and weaving would take place in people's home. With mechanisation, Mills would be built but then demolished when new processes came in which demanded more or different space. In 1851, the textile industry employed half the working population. In the second half of the century it was said that Stockport was building mills on a ‘monumental scale’ and many of these along the Ashton canal which provided fuel and raw materials and took away the finished product. Among many others two families come to be mentioned. The Gregs, whose father built Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, and the Houldsworths whose mill is a classic example of great industrial architecture; it was designed by architects AH Stott. It also offered a more efficient configuration and was in effect a double mill with a central section housing the steam power used by a factory on either side.

Stockport had become, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great centre for power loom weaving. Manufacturers often carried on both spinning and weaving until weaving became concentrated on East Lancashire. Stockport shifted its efforts to spinning and embraced the spinning of cotton waste and doubling (spinning two or more yarns together to produce greater strength). Spinners also adopted the ring frame which worked much faster than the mule.

In the mid nineteenth century the weaving of silk was taken on in a number of mills to supply the manufacturers of Macclesfield until, with a downturn in demand, Macclesfield took over all their weaving. The weaving of wool had been done for many years as a cottage industry. This too was explored in the mill context with two mills in production until 1939. A further innovation falls to be mentioned. As mills got bigger they did of course cost more and a number of companies adopted a joint stock status following the lead of Oldham.

What was successful was hat making. The mid nineteenth century saw a fashion move from silk hats to those made from felt. Here, Stockport companies such as Christys and Battersbsy stepped in and in the last thirty years of the century employment grew ten fold. Stockport manufacturers embraced the latest American machinery and prospered until fashions changed once more.

Engineering followed textiles with manufacturers of the ring frame and power looms. They also made machinery for hat making. Cravens manufactured cranes, Simon-Carves made mining equipment and Lancashire boilers were built at the Wellington boiler works.

With the coming of the First World War, National Aircraft Factory No 2 was built in the town and run by Crossley. The associated airstrip was also used by Avro from their Woodford factory. Later Fairey manufactured aircraft in the Second World War in nearby Heaton Chapel. The company moved to wheeled armoured vehicles and now operates as KNDS UK.

Further reading:

Peter Arrowsmith, Stockport - A History (Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, 1997)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Braintree manufacturing history - the story of silk

Like many of its neighbouring towns, Braintree was a weaving town producing heavy Anglian broadcloth. Again, like other towns, it received an influx of Flemish refugees who brought techniques enabling a lighter ‘Brockings’ cloth. A little later Huguenots arrived from France bringing with them skills in silk work. Most went to Spittlefields in east London and one such, George Courtauld, set up a factory in Pebmarsh and later moved to Braintree. It was his son, Samuel, who really began the silk business which would become a world famous textile giant.

Before looking at Courtauld, I took a step back to explore the story of Silk. It was Confucius who recorded the first evidence of this natural luxury material in 2604 BC and of course it was in China that silk worms were fed on the leaves mulberry trees, their cocoons gathered and thrown and silk thread spun for weaving into cloth. Neil Ferguson tells the story of the Princess who, in around 700 AD, stole the secret of silk and took it to neighbouring Khotan. Silk spread throughout Asia and the Romans brought it to Byzantium in time for the advance of Islam to spread silk wherever it invaded. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo brought the secret to Venice where thrived. It prospered too in Catalonia and Lyon, the latter so much so that the King handed to the town a monopoly. James I wanted a silk industry in Britain and imported mulberry trees which grew well. There is an ancient mulberry tree in the grounds of the old Bishops Palace in Lincoln which each year would produce fruit for my wife to collect. Sadly the silk worms struggled in the cold climate. This did not put off my father whose boyhood hobby at the turn of the twentieth century was breeding silk worms in his south London bedroom; his uncle had a mulberry tree in his garden from which my father would gather leaves for his hungry worms. I tell that story in Dunkirk to D Day.

Despite the unsuitability of the British climate for silk worms, it was perfect for spinning and weaving. The coming of the Hugenots brought skills and many settled. The industry grew in London, East Anglia, Macclesfield, Congleton, Derby and Coventry with ribbons. This British industry needed protection from imported cloth and this too was forthcoming. The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation to the industry which thrived until free trade open the flood gates to imports. Nearby Sudbury is now home to the remaining British silk weavers.

But back to Courtauld and Braintree...

In the first volume of his Courtaulds A Social and Economic History, D.C. Coleman delights his reader with the complexities of family and business relationships that led to Samuel being born in America and then spending the years from 1807 to 1816 getting into and out of the business of silk. Twelve years of trial and error then passed until in 1828 the firm of Courtauld, Taylor and Courtauld was formed. This went from silk to crepe silk for mourning dress on the death of Prince Albert to the world of artificial fibres and beyond. I write of Courtaulds in the context of the textile story in both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

Crittall Windows were another Braintree firm to arrive on the national stage. As was the case elsewhere, it was the First World War which marked the step change for Crittall. In 1905, they had moved into a large new factory employing 500 men. By 1918, they employed 2,000 men and women, having spent the war years on munitions work. The mass production techniques learnt from this work enabled the mass production of metal windows. These were to be found in famous buildings including the BBC at Portland Place, the Shell-Mex building on the Strand and London County Hall. The company fell into the clutches of Slater Walker but then found a home in the Norcros building products group before regaining independence through a management buyout. Crittall now manufacture in nearby Witham.

Further reading:

• D.C. Coleman, Courtaulds A Social and Economic History Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)
• John Marriage, Braintree & Brocking (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994)
• Neil Ferguson, A History of the World in a Hundred Objects
• http://www.silk.org.uk/history.php