‘The Most Beautiful Factory in the World’: the power of the garden image
An analysis of the extensive collections of photographs, illustrations, films and ephemera in company archives provides a fresh perspective on the factory gardens and parks. By means of illustrated lectures, publications and factory tours, in which the landscapes featured prominently, industrialists presented their enterprises as places of status, community, opportunity, health and hygiene and their products as authentic and modern. The landscapes and their representations defined this utopianist portrayal of working conditions and labour, and motivated myths about the commodities they produced. The advertising and packaging images from the early twentieth century of the companies discussed here are now iconic in the history of marketing and advertising, for it was largely through effective publicity that they became household names.