From factory gardens to ‘connected gardens’

From the 1950s until the end of the century, American architects and landscape architects were driving innovation in design for corporate clients, while in Britain differing economic and social conditions shaped some alternative strategies for designing office space. By the 1970s, with an increasing diversity and accessibility of leisure attractions outside the workplace, workplace recreation declined. In the twenty-first century digital age, the domesticated corporate garden of the early twentieth century industrial age has been reaffirmed; as companies strive to be socially responsible and sustainable, workplace gardens are promoted as sites for self-improvement. Providing gardens and physical exercise in the workplace is a response to the rapidity of technological change where nature’s redeeming powers become an antidote first to the machine age and then to the digital age and the corporate lives they construct. Corporate landscape design today has become a key factor in the promotion of responsible capitalism and at the same time, these landscapes play a vital role in the greening of our cities and suburbs and in embedding the principle that access to open green space is a human right.

‘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.

From model factory to modern factory

Initiatives to make gardens and parks at factories were a part of the wider public health and urban planning reforms taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In landscaping their factories and providing recreation space, industrialists contributed significantly to driving forward and funding environmental reform, although being privately owned and managed, they were subject to specific design considerations and rules of use. The First World War and its aftermath catalysed the importance of healthy and high-quality environments to industrial stability and progress, and the ‘Factory Garden Movement’ accelerated in the 1920s, inspired by a need to attract and to satisfy a more independent and demanding workforce. The key case studies are the Cadbury Chocolate factory in Bournville, UK; the National Cash Register Company factory, ‘The Cash’, in Dayton, Ohio, USA and Shredded Wheat and Spirella Corsets, companies that had factories in both nations.

‘The pleasant manufactory’

From the early years of the factory system in the late eighteenth century, when paternalistic industrialists built their works in rural landscapes or as part of a model industrial village or town, they experimented with ways of improving the aesthetic, social and cultural life of factories. Some provided recreation space and vegetable gardens to improve their employees’ health and morality, as well as to enhance the corporate image. By the end of the nineteenth century, factory gardens and recreation grounds had become integral to employee welfare provision at some model factories. By the 1920s, corporate leaders promoted their factory gardens and parks to signify a modern, healthy and stable industrial community built on mutual trust and respect between employer and employee.

Factory gardens and parks: profits or perks?

Corporate landscapes were designed for their potential to improve the quality of working life and they became powerful symbols of ideal conditions in industry. However, the suggestion that gardens are ‘an ideal’ in social and welfare reform presents a paradox because the corporate garden is a space both liberating and controlling. Power relations and structures between labour and capital and between men and women in the use and management of the gardens and recreation grounds were complex. The privately owned grounds were subject to regulations and management expectations, but power operates in society from the ‘bottom up’ as well as ‘top down’ and as Henri Lefebvre and others have argued, power can be found in the spaces between dominant power structures. Therefore some employees therefore benefited from the opportunities afforded by the gardens and recreation grounds, while others resented them for replacing fair wages and did not use them. The potential benefits to employees depended on many factors and so are difficult to evaluate. The value of factory gardens to industry is therefore more clearly seen in its contribution to profitability through public relations, rather than in an increase in the job satisfaction of the workforce.

Designing the company Arcadia

Rowheath Park at Bournville (from 1921) and the Hills and Dales Park, the Old Barn Club and Old River Park, made for NCR employees between 1906 and 1939, are highly significant to the history of corporate landscapes in terms of their scale and the sophistication of their designs in a factory context. A comparison of these parks, designed by landscape architects Cheals of Crawley, and the Olmsted Brothers respectively, reveal differences in the cultural, symbolic and stylistic approaches to landscape design in the two nations, including what it was possible to achieve in the suburban landscapes of Britain and the United States and in the beliefs, desires and expectations of the factory worker and his patriarch in what the landscape could provide for them. In context of corporate recreation, the scale and sophistication of these gardens and parks were astonishing and unprecedented. Their landscape architects succeeded in projecting local and national landscape identities through design, thus creating spaces that heightened employees’ sense of belonging to the region and to the corporate community.

‘Happy healthy workers are the world’s best’: factory landscapes, leisure and the model employee

From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War corporate gardens and parks provided opportunities for sports, music, dancing and gardening, activities that in some districts would not have been so readily accessible to working people, particularly to women and to youth. Middle class attitudes to ‘rational and respectable’ recreation shaped these activities and before the First World War, they were segregated by gender. However, recreational opportunities provided by these companies for their female and child employees were progressive by the industrial standards and, in some ways by the social standards of the day. The corporate landscapes also provided valuable land for food production in wartime and in the Great Depression.

‘The Factory in a Garden’/‘The Garden in a Factory’

Industrialists exploited the powerful cultural, symbolic and metaphorical meanings of gardens and parks to ‘engineer’ particular feelings, ideas, modes of behaviour and well-being amongst employees and consumers, particularly women. Gardens and landscaping had at times been employed for these means since the beginning of the factory system, but by the end of the century, landscaping at factories was becoming more sophisticated in terms of design and amenity. In America from the 1880s and to a lesser extent in Britain from the 1900s, the expertise of professional landscapists with specialist design and horticultural knowledge made it possible to enhance the beauty, function and symbolic value of the available space with the ultimate aims of increasing productivity and profit. Whilst promoted as a means to create a healthy environment, the union of gardens and factories was a form of social engineering to manipulate employees and to promote industrial capitalism as healthy, respectable, responsible and sustainable; therefore gardens and parks became agencies of control.

Introduction

This book presents a history of the factory gardens and parks movement in Britain and the United States, from its origins in the early Industrial Revolution, to its zenith in the years preceding the Second World War and concludes with an overview of the evolution of corporate landscapes from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Industrialists attempted to assuage the effects of mass production by embracing the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of gardens to refine corporate culture and to redefine industry as progressive and responsible. Industry contributed distinctively and significantly to gardening culture and to opportunities for outdoor recreation in the first half of the twentieth century. Analysing factories from the point of view of landscape has produced a significant new interpretation of factory design, society and culture, which draws out the meanings of time and space in the factory that are not related to the production line. The discussion draws on empirical evidence underpinned by sources from a broad disciplinary base, including areas of research within architectural, art, photographic, landscape and garden histories; cultural geography, social history, philosophy, gender studies and social science.