COMING TOGETHER
In 1799, a young man took on the running of a Scottish cotton mill business in the Clyde Valley in South Lanarkshire. Not content merely to manage the enterprise, he had decided “to commence the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race yet instituted”, though he noted: “My friends smiled at what they called my simplicity and urged me not to attempt such a hopeless impossibility. My mind, however, was prepared for the task.”
That young man was Robert Owen, and New Lanark, the purpose-built 18th-century mill village where he determined to pursue his ambition, is nowadays a UNESCO World Heritage Site, acknowledged as a model for industrial communities that would spread across the world. For Owen blazed a trail as a pioneering social reformer, championing everything from fair wages to the provision of decent homes and education for workers.
Owen’s story begins
