Endorsements

The factory in a garden is the first book to examine the development of parks and gardens at factories in Britain and America, as a model for the reshaping of the corporate environment in the twenty-first century. It questions why garden and landscape design contributed to the history and culture of factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how they benefited employers and employees. The answers reveal new insights into the 'special relationship' between Britain and American industrialists as they shaped their production facilities in the Progressive age. Factory gardens and parks contributed significantly to employee welfare policies and to wider social changes in ways that historians have not yet acknowledged, including the sports and leisure revolution, women's employment, gardening and health cultures and suburban development. The integrity of industrialists, who used gardens and gardening as forms of social engineering and control and promotion, is questioned and it is argued that today's domesticated and 'playful' office landscapes are created in the same spirit as those in the early twentieth century. The factory in a garden makes an important contribution to the topical debate on the health and well-being of society and provides 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 of gardening, students and lecturers in British and American landscape and social and cultural histories.