ScottishArchitecture.com

Factories are the buildings that architecture forgot.   They are driven by targets set by time-and-motion men and accountants.   They are ruled by the bottom line, yet despite decades of firm evidence that a well-designed, agreeable factory environment actually helps people to work more efficiently, how many factories apply that theory?    Taybank Works was a model factory, the last survivor of Dundee’s jute trade, yet there will soon be no trace left of Jute City...



Tay Spinners, the company which latterly ran the mill, was active until recently–  I passed by everyday on my way to Architecture School through the 1990’s, and often got a glimpse into the interior through the loading bays.   The dusty twilight of the understorey was visible as forklift trucks shuttled to and fro across the bus lanes of Arbroath Road, loading lorries with rolls of carpet yarn.   The mysterious depths contained enormous bales of both raw and processed jute, and the vast storey above held unguessed-of rows of spinning machines.



It’s difficult to conceive of a manufacturer today building such well-appointed premises as were erected during the reconstruction effort which followed the Second World War.   New Taybank Works was the first jute plant to be built after the War, commissioned by the S.C.W.S., or Co-op as it was affectionately known–  in fact, it was one of only two brand new post-War jute mills in Britain, the other being Douglasfield in Dundee’s sprawling eastern suburbs.   Taybank New Works were designed by the S.C.W.S.’s architect, Kenneth F. Masson, and built between 1947 and 1949 on the site of the former Lilybank Foundry.   Despite the restrictions of austerity during the 1940’s, Taybank was one of the most impressive factories in Scotland, in both scale and in detail:  the complex takes up an entire block in the Blackshade district of the city, between Kemback and Morgan Streets and the Arbroath Road, one of the main arteries leading into Dundee from the east.  



Taybank demonstrates the case for a city with mixed uses, with housing and shops and factories and schools and all of human life integrated into the urban grid.   It’s a more sustainable, less disposable way of creating a city, since it avoids the dead zones:  dormitory suburbs which are dead during the daytime, city centres which empty when the offices shut at 5pm.   Architecturally, Taybank is the climax of the single-storey “Northlight” factory, which has its roots in Detroit in the 1920’s–  where the modern factory was literally invented, to build Ford Model T cars–  and it is also representative of the precocious attitude to factory construction which characterises Dundee.   It is faced in hard-fired red brick and faiënce tiles, and it shares that harsh brick, which is uncharacteristic in this part of Scotland, with other landmark buildings such as Watson’s Bond in Dundee’s Seagate, and Richardsons’ flax mill, the “Bastille”, in Aberdeen’s Maberley Street.    Thus Taybank is in Dundee, but it’s not quite of it.    



The Co-op’s credo meant that its buildings derive from a vein of paternal socialism–  an almost Fabian attitude to the care of its employees–  which stretches back to the example of Robert Owen’s mills at New Lanark.   At Taybank, the workers were bathed in light which poured through both the glazed curtain walls, and great expanses of patent glazing on the north-facing parts of the sawtooth roofs.  Yet all the time, we are aware of the art critic Herbert Read’s famous axiom–  “Machinery is aggressive.   The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine.”    Jute mills are a dusty environment, and the lung diseases thus caused were well understood by the 1940’s, so that big centrifugal fans were used to clear the air.   In fact, raw jute is a dangerous fibre:  several of Dundee’s most serious fires of the 1960’s and ‘70’s–  including Candle Lane, Whale Lane and Arthurstone Terrace–  were in jute warehouses, where the application of heat and then water caused the jute bales to expand massively, forcing walls outwards and causing them to collapse.  



High parapets and the undercroft loading bays conceal the structure, layout and also the parti of the Taybank Works:  effectively, the Arbroath Road frontage and entrance sit one level under the main floorplate, carried on deep beams to take the large loading generated by the heavy jute machinery.   Large floor-to-ceiling heights accommodated both the modern jute spinning machines (manufactured by firms like Douglas Frasers of Arbroath), and also the press-packing machines in the loading area.   The factory’s steel frame allowed for rapid construction;  this was clad in a brick box, which in turn was faced with faiënce tiling.  



The building has a great deal of the inter-war “super cinema” about it:  both factory and cinema were exemplars of the type of building which typified Modernism.   The spirit of the cinema was a telling one to invoke, since Dundee had more cinemas per head of population than any other Scottish city, including the luxurious 4100-seater Green’s Playhouse in the Nethergate.   The corner entrance at Taybank, with its great glazed portal has a striking glamour about it which no other mill shared–  even down to the flagpoles on the brick entrance tower.   The entrance lobby continues the cinema analogy:  through the broad slot-glazed doors and into the curved foyer, you rejoice in terrazzo floors and swooping steps,  then adjust your eyes from the bright street outside to the darkened theatre–  in this case, the factory undercroft.   So the cinema became a metaphor for the factory, the factory became a cinema and thus turned into the thing which it sought to escape.



The modern jute industry was invented in Dundee, and it built Dundee during the 19th Century:  the industrial muscle came from not only the trading and processing of jute fibre, but also the jute machinery makers like T.C. Keay and U.L.R.O.   However, before the Great War, they short-sightedly began to export the means of production to the countries where jute is grown.   In Bangladesh, Pakistan, and on the Hooghly River in India, Dundee equipment is still working, well-engineered and unkillable, long after it killed the industry in the city of its birth.   Thus were sown the seeds of its own demise…  The long-predicted eclipse of jute caused by foreign suppliers, and artificial fibres such as polypropylene, finally did for Taybank.   On 19th October 1998, the MV Banglar Urmi docked in Dundee with the final shipment of raw jute to be sent to the city:  310 tons from Chittagong.   The last bale of raw jute was processed in May 1999, and in a final ironic twist, the new owners of Tay Spinners imported workers from Calcutta to dismantle the factory’s power looms–  Taybank had been sold to the reclusive jute magnate G.J. Wadwha, who employs 10,000 people at his giant Champdany Mills in Calcutta.   A ship sailed back to India with all of Taybank’s machinery in August 1999, and with it the one-time engine of Dundee’s prosperity.

After the New Works closed, it began to decay:  five years later, Historic Scotland expressed concern at the smashed windows and general dilapidation.   Taybank’s interior was cleared during 2005, with the site going for speculative housing.   The stoor, the roar of the spinning machines, the last survivor of Jute City have all gone…