With the ongoing destruction of Western Europe’s industrial base, not only have everyday products bearing household names disappeared; the corporations who made them have vanished – and entire classes of building have been culled. The paper mill is on the verge of extinction; there is only one cane sugar refinery left in Britain; and the tyre factory is on the brink of disappearing from the country which gave birth to the tyre.
The evolution of the rubber industry parallels the development of the tyre factory as a building type. The original rubber companies bought up, or created, large plantations in Malaysia during the Victorian era. They controlled the means of supply by tapping the latex plant, which provided the raw material for rubber in the form of its milky white liquid sap. In fact, the first rubber company was set up by Robert Dunlop, an Ayrshire vet: with Dunlop, Robert Thomson (inventor of the inflatable tyre) and also Mr. Mackintosh of raincoat fame, Scotland was the cradle of the world’s rubber industry. Dunlop and his peers built up merchant fleets, and constructed new types of building at home to convert the raw latex into india-rubber. A parallel could be drawn between the imperial in those days, and the corporate today: the authority of both stretched across national boundaries, and both were founded on a trade in resources travelling one way, and finished goods in the other.
The industry was built up for a century, then began to consolidate after WW2; recently it has declined markedly. Many tyre plants have closed in the last few years, including Uniroyal (latterly Continental) at Newbridge, Dunlop at Uddingston, a Goodyear factory at Garscadden, the former Avon plant at Sunderland; and a little further back, Michelin in Aberdeen, as well as Goodyear at Wolverhampton, and the spiritual home of the tyre industry, Fort Dunlop in Birmingham. At the time of its closure, the newspapers claimed that Uniroyal was Scotland’s last tyre factory, since the India Tyres plant at Inchinnan had closed 15 years previously – but they ignored the fact that the massive Michelin plant in Dundee, now one of the largest in Europe, is still going strong! It is, however, one of few survivors, and most of the earlier victims have already been demolished.
In the same way that students of the castle, asylum, or tenement can study its development as a class of building, industrial buildings can be split into different typologies. Since the late 1800’s, architectural historians have followed the evolution of the mill (the first industrialised building form) from Arkwright’s prototypes such as Stanley Mills on the Tay, through the iron-framed fireproof mill, to Hennebique’s concrete-framed factories designed to house mass production, which culminated in Ford’s works at Highland Park near Detroit. Henry Ford instigated the production line in order to build the Model “T”, and that particular form of building culminated between the wars as the northlight factory, which was the last “architecturally-considered” industrial building. Or so our conditioned minds were led to believe … having been nurtured by set texts which all tow the same line of architectural theory. One-offs like ABK’s Cummins engine plant at Shotts, or Richard Roger’s Inmos factory in Newport, Gwent are written off as exceptions.
By contrast, an entire post-war generation of profiled metal-clad factories may seem easy to dismiss as “tin boxes”, but they are just the next step along in the rationalising, reductivist process which began in the 1700’s with the invention of the factory. They are not a reaction against architecture: they are buildings founded on functional analysis, and inside the dumb box is a flowline superimposed with several different ordering systems. Dunlop, Avon, Michelin, Pirelli, Continetal and Goodyear all commissioned new factories, and those are this article’s focus. The post-war tyre factory has a Constructivist quality: large volumes are created to suit the scale of the operation, and the armatures of machinery provides the building's articulation. The great floorplate of the Rubber Floor is incised with series of pits, tracks and channels like the unreadable transmissions of the Incas on the Nazca Plain. Yet by understanding the industrial archaeology of living memory, we can decode them.
I’ll begin with Newbridge, as it has an important place in Scotland’s industrial history. The factory was commissioned by the North British Rubber Company, which was originally set up in 1856 as the first rubber company in Scotland, and only the second in the world. In the intervening century, the N.B.R.C. grew to become one of Scotland’s biggest companies, so that by the 1950’s it operated the largest factory in Edinburgh, at Castle Mills in Fountainbridge, and employed over 3600 people. In 1956, the United States Rubber Company (Uniroyal) bought over North British, using the Scottish company as a springboard to establish itself in Europe. In 1965, a greenfield site at Newbridge was acquired, with the intention of building a modern tyre factory to replace the old plant at Castle Mills – the “North British Rubber Co. Expansion Plan, Phase 1” as the new works was dubbed. Alongside it, North British would build a factory to produce other rubber and plastic goods such as timing belts, Treadaire carpet underlay, and golfballs, as well as Royalite thermoplastic.
The design brief for Newbridge called for a building designed “for maximum economy, with a neat, attractive and orderly appearance.” You can decide for yourself based on the photos. Although rubber companies were usually well-diversified – Dunlop made aircraft brakes, tennis racquets and wellie boots; Avon made gas masks and inflatable boats – their factories tended to be specialised, and very large. The new generation of factories, including Newbridge; Sunderland; the still-active Pirelli factory in Carlisle, and the Michelin plant in Dundee, were built in the late 1960’s and their construction followed an explosion in car sales. This motoring boom during the Sixties also marked the development of radial tyres, which were a great step forward in tyre technology, but which utilised different manufacturing processes to their predecessor, the cross-ply tyre. New methods led inevitably to either heavy adaptation, or the need for new buildings. Most manufacturers opted for the latter route.
As a symbol of how the modern world works, and how industrial architecture has evolved since WW2, the tyre factory is a useful lens. The post-war tyre factory has its antecedents in the work of Wallace Gilbert & Partners in the 1920’s: they designed the Firestone tyre factory on London’s Western Avenue, then went on to build another tyre plant, for India of Inchinnan. These demonstrative Art Deco buildings acted as billboards for the tyre companies, and emphasised the early rubber companies’ genius for publicity. You have the Goodyear’s blimp which appears so often in photos of the New York skyline; Michelin’s “Bibendum” man with his inflatable midriff; Pirelli’s calendar ("Don’t look too closely at the walls”, I was told as a small boy whilst I walked around a lorry workshop). Most memorable of all was Dunlop’s “D” and arrow logo, which plastered race circuits across the world, appearing several times a lap in each motor race. This visual profligacy contrasts with the “low profile” (sorry!) which tyre factory design has adopted since then.
Modern tyre plants are largely steel-framed buildings, the exception being their heavily-reinforced concrete towers which deal with heavy loadings imposed by the mixing machinery. Most are clad in crinkly tin. They bear all the hallmarks of heavy industry: built on a large scale (in the case of Newbridge and Sunderland, around 400 metres long), their layout is led by process engineering rather than the flow of people; they require the sort of large investment which can only come from large corporations; and the technology changes incrementally, rather than in a revolutionary way. Hence, with the exception of the change from cross-ply to radial, the form of the buildings evolved gradually. Inside, there is usually a limited amount of light, and most surfaces are coated in a thick layer of carbon black – the compound added to rubber to make it black Everywhere is the pervasive smell of rubber: clinging, slightly acrid, and instantly recognisable.
The components of tyres proceed along a track of conveyors – leading from one end of the factory to the other. This production line is housed in a succession of clearly demarcated spaces: firstly, the Raw Goods stores which are bright, high-roofed warehouses; they lead through roller shutter doors into the “Kitchen”, or pre-production part of the tyre factory, where ingredients for tyre compounds are prepared, before they are lifted up into the Banbury Tower. Also sometimes known as the CMS Mixer Tower, the Banbury section of the plant – a “Banbury” is an enclosed machine for mixing rubber compounds – is the five or six storey tower close to the Raw Goods end of the building. The tower has carbon black silos at the top, with rubber, silica and plasticiser batching and charging below, then racks at the bottom which collect the product. Its mixing machines sit within concrete armatures, fed by ducts and silos, and powered by huge multi-megawatt motors.
Beyond the tower, the Rubber Floor or assembly area stretches away into the distance: the rubber compound becomes a tread section or sidewall, and is combined with the radial belts (made from steel and nylon cords), and the tyre bead, a steel wire. At the Downstream end of the plant are assembly machines where the tyre carcasses are built up, usually in a large steel-framed shed with a high roof peppered with fire and fume extractors. The green tyres are cured, often inside “bladders”, enclosed in turn within curing presses; from there, they pass through vulcanising pits, before being left to cool. Nearby are the Quality Control (QC) laboratories, a clean environment in contrast to the factory floor, where tyres are checked before they make their way to the Finished Goods warehouse. In a modern plant, this consists of high, narrow aisle racking which is serviced by robotised forklift trucks.
And there you have your tyre, ranging from a 135 x 70 R14 on a supermini’s steel wheel, to the 255 x 30 Z18 on a sports car’s starfish-shaped alloy. We still need tyres; and the number of cars on our roads is still increasing. Why are these factories shutting? The death of the British tyre industry came about in response to that dread phrase, market forces. Market forces also dictate the fate of the buildings, which is usually demolition; they may have little merit in the eyes of architectural historians (Pevsner was only a fan of industry when it was designed by Gilbert Scott) but these factories are unique environments, unlike anything else. They may not be judged worth preserving, but once they close down, and are flattened to make room for supermarkets and tract housing, they will have gone for good, taking a building typology with them.
All photos copyright Mark Chalmers – with thanks to Roger Williams and Gerry Keightley of Ashall for their help in preparing this article.
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