Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa

Abstract

This article examines the Arcon system, a flexible prefabricated steel structure used for the construction of factories and warehouses that accompanied industrial development in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone during 1950s and 1960s. While initially created for emergency housing in Britain during World War II, the Arcon system was successfully marketed across the West African colonies in the immediate post-war period, largely through the backing of a British-owned contracting firm, Taylor Woodrow. Although not distinctive designs, these steel sheds, clad with asbestos sheets or local materials, were highly efficient structures that supported and enabled a system of colonial resource extraction. The Arcon system, we argue, was successful because it mediated between two sets of constraints: the temporalities created by the impending timetable of independence, and the material constraints on the production of architecture in the region, including the labor required. Through this examination of the Arcon system, we show that the developmental projects instituted as a prelude to decolonization proved profitable for British contractors like Taylor Woodrow, but also that business practices and material flows shaping the built environment under colonialism persisted into the immediate post-colonial period.