‘The Factory in a Garden’ A History of Corporate Landscapes from the Industrial to the Digital Age (Manchester University Press, 2017)

The Factory in a Garden traces the history and development of the corporate landscape movement in Britain and America from its origins in the late 18^th century to its twenty-first century equivalent in company pleasure, sports and vegetable gardens such as those at Google in Mountain View California, or on the roof of the new Google offices in London. The book is the first study of its kind examining the development of parks, gardens, and outdoor leisure facilities for factories and offices in Britain and America as a model for the reshaping of the corporate environment in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book to give a comprehensive account of the contribution of gardens, gardening and recreation to the history of responsible capitalism and ethical working practices.

Similar factory landscaping was taking place in continental Europe, particularly I believe in Germany and Sweden, but this book focuses on Britain and the United States, when a corporate landscape movement emerged in the spirit of competition and cooperation between the two nations at the time of the USA’s ascendancy as the leading industrial nation. It reveals new insights into the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and American industrialists as they shaped their production facilities in the Progressive Age.

In the book, I focus on the period from the 1880s to the 1950s when it became common for large companies to provide sports and recreation grounds for employees and many employers opened pleasure gardens and allotments, or community gardens. The making of gardens and parks around or near office and factory buildings, designed by professionals, was driven by a belief in the value of gardens and parks to recruitment and retention of staff, to industrial welfare, and to advertising, corporate identity and public relations. The book tells how factory gardens and parks contributed to employee welfare and to wider social changes, including the sports and leisure revolution, women’s employment, gardening and health cultures and suburban development. I discuss the idea of the garden as utopianist space and show how industrialists appropriated the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of designed green space to impose their cultural and economic power and to harmonise industry and nature. I question the integrity of industrialists who used gardens and gardening as forms of social engineering and control and promotion and suggests that today’s domesticated and ‘playful’ office landscapes are created in the same spirit as, and with similar motives to those in the early twentieth century.

The book is conceived within a conceptual framework of theory developed in cultural geography and social science on the organisation of place and space and the power relations that operate within social space. I base my research on primary sources from company archives in the UK and the USA, supported by secondary sources from cross-disciplinary perspectives including philosophy, architectural history, social history, histories of sports and leisure, landscape history and theory, the history and theory of photography and women’s studies.

‘The Factory in a Garden’ makes an important contribution to the topical debate on the health and well-being of society and provides a historical context for many contemporary concerns about the quality of life at work, how we maintain access to open space and how gardening need not be restricted to private gardens or municipal allotments, but can take place in unconventional places. This book will appeal to all those interested in the history and design of cultural landscapes and gardening and in the architectural, social and cultural histories of factories and offices.

I would very much like to hear from historians with similar interests with a view to developing research into the history and design of corporate landscapes, particularly in the rest of Europe, Australia and the Far East.

See here for a Q&A with me on the Manchester University Press blog.