New Lanark

• Official Name: New Lanark
• Location: South Lanarkshire, Scotland
• Type: Cultural
• Year of Inscription: 2001

New Lanark is an eighteenth-century village located about one hour from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Originally centered around a water-wheel powered cotton mill, the village was built on utopian principles that emphasized the need for those managing the mill to ensure that the workers had everything they needed. In addition to spacious and comfortable housing, workers had access to health care, night classes, and the first nursery school in the world.

Unlike most mills of the time, New Lanark’s management emphasized a humanitarian approach to running the facility. Education was provided for the children, and the youngest were not permitted to work in the mills. The rest of the village was developed in a way that addressed the well-being of the more than two thousand people who lived there at its peak. Efforts were made to keep crime to a minimum and ensure that mill workers could grow emotionally and spiritually. Within a short time after its establishment, New Lanark became a model for other mill-centered towns.

The mill continued to operate in one form or another for nearly two hundred years before closing in 1968. Thereafter, its buildings were abandoned and began to disintegrate. In the 1970s, interest grew in preserving the legacy of what had been a unique trendsetting facility. Since then, the former mill buildings have been reimagined as a hotel, office space, and exhibit halls. The former worker housing units continue to serve as a combination of private and social housing where as many as two hundred people live. The site is protected by several groups, including the New Lanark Conservation Trust and the Scottish Ten Project. In 2001, it was added to the list of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites.

History

David Dale, a Glasgow banker and entrepreneur, came up with the idea for New Lanark and opened it in 1785. He initially worked with Richard Arkwright, who is credited with developing the first water-powered spinning equipment used in textile manufacturing and initiating the modern factory system. However, the two parted ways after a year and Dale ran the site alone.

Dale took a humanitarian approach to New Lanark from its earliest days. Although his employees worked thirteen-hour days, from six in the morning to seven in the evening, they were treated better than most workers in the growing Industrial Revolution. They had a half-hour breakfast break and an hour for a dinner break, with food provided by the mill. This included ample portions of porridge for breakfast, while dinner was often a broth with beef or fish and potatoes. Workers had access to health care, education, and church services. They were provided with clothing, better bedding than most similar operations of the time, and had access to banking services, so they could put money into savings accounts.

Under Dale’s leadership, the mill employed children, often orphans or children known as pauper’s apprentices. These apprentices came from families that could not afford to care for their children, so they apprenticed them out to businesses where they would have room and board and learn a skill. At one point, New Lanark employed as many as eight hundred children and teens; however, according to records from the mill, they received better care than most children working in factories at the time.

In 1799, Dale’s daughter, Caroline, married Robert Owen. Owen formed a partnership to buy New Lanark from his father-in-law and within a year, he and Caroline had moved to there and begun raising a family. Owen also began making changes to the operations at the mill. He believed that it was possible to run a business that was financially successful and also benefited the lives of its employees.

Owen first focused on making the mill more profitable. He instituted new record-keeping practices that made it easier to identify areas of waste and theft. Owen used these increased profits to institute reforms to better care for the workers. This included reducing the workday from thirteen hours to ten and a half. He removed very young children from the workforce and provided schools, including the first nursery school in the world to care for the workers’ youngest children and infants. Children through the age of ten or twelve attended the Institute for the Formation of character, where they were taught social and moral behavior in addition to academic subjects. Corporal punishment was banned, and music, dancing, and physical activity were emphasized. An evening school gave older children and adult workers a chance to take classes after they finished working for the day.

Owen added several buildings to the mill complex. In addition to the schools, he added a bakery and stores for the workers. He also increased the capability and efficiency of the mill by adding a foundry, a workshop, and other structures. These improvements generated more profits, which Owen reinvested in his vision for creating a utopian workplace and society, an early form of social enterprise.

Some of Owen’s other initiatives at New Lanark included free medical care with a doctor onsite and a form of self-funded workers compensation. Employees contributed a small portion of their income to this “sickness fund,” which they could then draw on if they were too sick or injured to work. His efforts also included regular inspections to make sure homes were being kept in a clean, bug-free manner to reduce the spread of illness and provided plots of land for the mill’s residents to grow healthy food for themselves.

At the height of its operation, more than 2,500 people lived, worked, and went to school in New Lanark. Owen moved on to other enterprises in the United States in 1820 and the sons of one of his partners took over the mill’s operation. Charles and Henry Walker ran the facility much as Owen had. However, the Walkers were less interested in promoting the social experiment being run at New Lanark, so less is known about any changes they made. They maintained ownership until the 1880s, when the mill was sold to Henry Birkmyre of the Gourock Ropework Company (GRC), and his partner, Margaret Somerville. The Ropeworks remain at the site until 1968, when New Lanark was abandoned after nearly two hundred years in operation.

After the Ropeworks left, the buildings began to deteriorate. In the mid-1970s, the New Lanark Conservation Trust was established to preserve the site’s historical significance. A hotel, a heritage center, office spaces, and exhibit halls were created in the spaces where thousands worked and lived during Dale and Owen’s social experiment. In the twenty-first century, New Lanark is home to about two hundred people and is a tourist destination visited by thousands each year.

Significance

New Lanark represents one of the earliest attempts to create a business that cared as much about the welfare of its workers as it did about it owners’ financial success. The utopian vision of both Dale and Owen, along with Owen’s emphasis on developing a workforce that was industrious, well-cared for, and moral, made New Lanark a model for other businesspeople to follow. At a time when many businesses were treating workers like tools or property, squeezing from them every possible bit of productivity without concern for their welfare, New Lanark demonstrated that a business could care for its employees and remain profitable. The practices initiated at the mill were successfully replicated at other businesses throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and beyond.

In recognition of this contribution to society, New Lanark became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. To be chosen as a World Heritage Site, a location must meet at least one of ten criteria. New Lanark met three criteria. First, the way Dale and Owen adapted the newly devised factory system to incorporate care for the well-being of the workers while still maintaining profitability demonstrated an important interchange of human values over a time in a way that impacted both technology and community planning. Second, the multiple buildings at the site were examples of architecture put into place to meet a variety of needs, from the commercial success of the company to the physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of its worker-residents. Third, the reforms and humane practices instituted by Owen in the operation of New Lanark were adopted by many others, resulting in profound changes in living and employment conditions for many workers around the world.

Although the mill complex came close to being lost to neglect in the 1970s, the efforts made to rescue it have resulted in structures that have a different function but look as they did when Owen and his employees lived and worked there. The conservation efforts maintained a high level of authenticity to the original form and structure of the buildings, and the original water sources that once powered the mill have been preserved. New Lanark now stands as a testimony to a utopian vision that succeeded far beyond the lifespan of its founders.

Bibliography

Dick, Sandra. “New Lanark World Heritage Site: How It Was Almost Lost Forever.” The Herald, 19 May 2019, www.heraldscotland.com/news/17649769.new-lanark-world-heritage-site-almost-lost-forever/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“New Lanark.” Cyark, www.cyark.org/projects/new-lanark/in-depth. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“New Lanark.” New Lanark, www.newlanark.org/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“New Lanark.” UNESCO World Heritage Convention, whc.unesco.org/en/list/429/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

“New Lanark Visitor Centre.” Visit Scotland, www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/new-lanark-visitor-centre-p255251. Accessed 14 July 2022.