“Workers of the world unite in green spaces”
Tech companies are reinventing the 19th-century tradition of employers providing gardens for staff.
Elizabeth Tyler, Financial Times, May 11, 2018. Link to article.

Richard Mawrey, Historic Gardens Review, No 44

‘These gardens have not been much studied, so that Helena Chance’s The Factory in a Garden: a History of Corporate Landscapes from the Industrial to the Digital Age comes as a welcome addition to the garden library. Chance covers the period from Robert Owen in the early 19th century to the carefully designed office gardens of today but she majors on two sites: Bournville, the landscape and village surrounding the Cadbury chocolate factory near Birmingham in the UK, and the National Cash Register Company’s complex in Dayton, Ohio. This is a formidable work of scholarship.’

“Tech Nirvana; why gardens at the office are good for you”

A review by Sarah Eaton of a talk I gave on 8th December 2016 at Kellogg College, Oxford, for the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust.

This elegant lecture, based on Helena’s forthcoming ‘The Factory in a Garden’, opened our eyes. It transpires offices and factories have long recognised the benefits of incorporating outdoor spaces into their workplaces. We looked first at the factory garden from the Industrial Revolution to the Second World War, then the period following the War, the office garden today, the response of the employees as well as considering whether we need office gardens at all.

In Coalbrookdale in 1782 Richard Reynolds encouraged Sunday walks and exercise in order that the men were better able to tackle the factory work. We heard about Robert Owen on the Clyde who encouraged dancing as exercise, and Titus Salt’s factory. The leading industrialists all wished to create a sense of place and a sense of time and to populate their new landscapes with fashionable people. William Morris’s factory at Merton Abbey reinforced the idea of the “Factory as it Might Be” in an article he published in “Justice.” Many of us had probably heard of the Cadbury model at Bournville where gardens were made especially for the workers, with private separate areas for girls and men. Far-sighted philanthropists also promoted gardening to make disciplined adults of certain delinquents. The benefits of all this were significant: a burgeoning aesthetic sense; a feeling of respectability and safety; a sense of community and domesticity; health improvements; status; but above all, there was an increased profit to be made from contented workers. As the National Cash Register Company slogan put it: “it pays”!

So the acclaimed Californian Google Mountain View concept of 2015 isn’t entirely new; it’s simply reinvented for the 21st century. We have all seen the Hoover building at Perivale so often it was a joy to have its context explored. Likewise the indoor atria of hospitals and schools: it was revelatory to realise that these were far from successful at first – in the pioneering days at the 1967 Ford Foundation plants died in these startling new conditions.

Over time, workplace developments are becoming more egalitarian and humanitarian: roof gardens, green walls; Vodafone’s lawns and ice-cream van at Newbury and the garden of Japanese bank Nomura which is maintained by the switchboard operators. Multinationals which have transformed their workers’ surroundings to confer an improved quality of life are to be applauded. An inspiring tonic and a very thoughtful way to end the OGT year.

Sarah Eaton Garden Designs