Employer, Industrial Housing and the Evolution of Company Welfare Policies in Britain's Heavy Industry: West Scotland, 1870–1920

Abstract

The history of working-class housing has become an imporatnt area of urban studies in recent years, as detailed investigations of building activities and property relations uncover the origins of housing initiatives. The growth of cities in the industrial North of England created their own peculiar building styles and housing problems, whilst the great metropolis of London continued to attract thousands of families into its eternal slums. There were also the new boom towns of manufacturing Britain, specialising in particular products as a regional division of productive expertise emerged. Swindon and Crewe flourished in the railway age of the nineteenth century, whilst Barrow and Jarrow belonged to a later period of iron and steel shipbuilding. The latter settlements were dominated not only by a few vital products, but by a handful of large companies with massive resources, which enabled them to undertake the housing of their first workers. These accounts may be complemented by the evidence of working-class dwellings in the early textile villages and larger industrial colonies of Lancashire and West Riding, or by the scattered documentation on the colliery villages which persisted through the major coal fields well into the twentieth century.