KYQ4: New Lanark

His mission statement

It seemed an apposite time to make a visit to New Lanark, where former cotton mills powered by water from the River Clyde have been restored by a local Trust. It was a working community of 2500 people in the early nineteenth century when it was managed by Robert Owen, the son in law of David Dale who had built the community. Robert Owen created a more inclusive form of industrialisation based on the pursuit of individual happiness and collective endeavour. A local shop was provided by Robert Owen to sell good quality items at a cheaper price than shops in the nearby town of Lanark. It returned a profit that was returned to the community by way of building a nursery for infants who could walk and providing one of the first schools, which was free for all children until the age of ten. Owen also created an Institute for the Formation of Character, where music, dance, mathematics, geography and history were taught to adults, a prototype for a local college of education. This form of local shop was effectively owned by its customers and provided the template for the creation of the cooperative movement by the Rochdale pioneers.

Robert Owen was in the vanguard of social reformers and created a village that was one of the earliest examples of urban planning. This was recognised by the New Lanark Trust when it acquired and began the restoration of the site in the 1980's. The Royal Town Planning Institute was very much to the fore in bringing this to fruition and it benefited greatly from the European Union, which funded much of the work and subsequently enabled New Lanark to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The former Director of Planning of Lanark, Graham U'ren, set out the reasons for the siting of New Lanark in the 2018 Commemorative Lecture.

New Lanark impresses you first by its physical appearance, a fine assemblage of sandstone buildings nestling in a gorge at the foot of the falls of Clyde. The inventor of the water frame for spinning yarn, Richard Arkwright of Preston, described the site at New Lanark thus: "There is no place I have ever seen which affords better situations or more ample streams for cotton machinery.” It is estimated that the river Clyde provides the greatest volume of running water anywhere in Britain.

Its setting is within a magnificent wooded valley of native trees along the sandstone gorge. Unfortunately, the site has been somewhat blighted by an unsightly coniferous plantation above the west bank. As well as an industrial museum in one of the old mills, the other buildings have been put to good use for housing, a hotel, youth hostel, wildlife display, and separate museums in the former school, shop and Robert Owen's house. Then there are the inevitable tourism shops, cafes and the usual not very relevant clutter of promotion banners from the tourist board. On the day it was virtually devoid of visitors and we spent over 3 hours absorbing the chance to enjoy the inheritance traits of a social reformer.

It was the day that Chancellor Philip Hammond set his budget. He acknowledged the gross unfairness of many aspects of global capitalism as did the free press mainly because they had some celebrity entrepreneurs like Philip Green to blame. It occurred to us that David Dale and Robert Owen seemed more relevant than ever. Hammond finally found the nerve to introduce some extra tax on global digital companies and to claim the end of austerity (its fake news folk), but there was no attempt to regulate the short-term vandalism by hedge funds and the financial markets that have destroyed much of British industry and the retail sector in recent years; Evans bikes being the latest casualty sold by a hedge fund to Mike Ashley who is to close half the stores. The Chancellor would have done better by firing up a DeLorean to go forward to the past and adopt some of Robert Owen's ideas, he was a man well ahead of his time.