Lost Derby

By Maxwell Craven

Derby has grown from a medieval market town to become a centre of industry. Derby was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution as following the silk mill and china factory established in the eighteenth century, it became home to heavy engineering following the arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century, as well as related iron and brass foundries. Later it became famous for the production of Rolls-Royce cars and aero engines. In the last century, much manufacturing has moved away and although the city is still associated with engineering, the face of Derby has changed significantly through street widening, housing clearance, retail centres, expansion into the surrounding countryside and the creation of suburbs, not to mention an inner ring road which saw the loss of some familiar landmarks despite providing two new bridges across the River Derwent.Lost Derby presents a portrait of a city and a way of life that has radically changed or disappeared today, showing not just the industries, buildings, people and street scenes that have gone, but also many popular places of entertainment and much more. This fascinating photographic history of lost Derby will appeal to all those who live in the city or know it well, as well as those who remember it from previous decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781445688718

Book preview

Introduction

Loss, in environmental terms, is not necessarily a bad thing, but is an inevitable consequence of growth, modernisation, changing demographics and the demands of technology. It is a necessary thing, but needs to be managed, which is why the 1948 Town and Country Planning Act was adopted by the government of Earl Attlee. If one has a legal and statutory framework to work to, change can indeed be managed so that the best of what is already in place – buildings, landscapes, streetscapes – can be protected and the requirements of the modern world fitted round them in such a way as not to devalue them.

There is also the problem of human nature. Loss of the familiar can be traumatic and, whatever the reality of that loss, to look back on it in comparison with what has succeeded it creates nostalgia, the rose-tinted spectacles of times past, reinforced by well-remembered and loved familiar surroundings. Change inflicted upon ordinary people de haut en bas inevitably causes pain.

Yet change must come, and we have to endure the loss of the familiar to some extent and very often what replaces it can come to be enjoyed in its turn, softened by the passage of time. Historic buildings, however, are more than just erections in which we live, work, buy and sell or enjoy ourselves. They are very often the product of a creative process which starts with the architect in concert with the person paying the bills and moves through the creators: sculptors, artists, masons, bricklayers, joiners, stuccadori and so on. An architect-designed building, however humble or workaday, is as much a work of art as a painting.

The difference is that a building also has utility and cannot be moved into a gallery to be admired when time-expired. People who seek to make impressive profits from redevelopment and local politicians hoping to cut a dash frequently have a problem remembering this, which is why the 1948 Act gave us listing and subsequent legislation refined it, adding scheduled ancient monuments, conservation areas, world heritage sites and so on.

Derby is no different to any other medium-sized, semi-industrial settlement although, thanks to its history, it punches well above its weight in the historical baggage it carries, along with elements of the built environment that reflect that history.

After four centuries of Roman rule, the original core of Derby at Little Chester was refortified by the Danes, who were ultimately evicted from the area in 918, after which modern Derby was founded nearly a mile further down the Derwent.

A prosperous county town grew up which from the early eighteenth century gradually became a leading site for the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. By 1723 we had England’s first factory in the Silk Mill, soon to reopen as the British Museum of Making, an attraction of national standing. Derby was home to two members of the Lunar Society, the intellectual cockpit of the English Enlightenment, and their circle included such creative men as Joseph Wright, Joseph Pickford and Peter Burdett, who painted them, built for them and inspired them. Then came Jedidiah Strutt and Thomas Evans with their cotton mills, a series of modernising Improvement Acts and ultimately the railway age, which refocused the industrialisation of the city from luxury products to engineering, ushering in an age from which the city, renewed, is only just emerging.

Thus the eighteenth century gave us ‘high-end’ products – silk, clocks, scientific instruments, fine porcelain, pottery, decorative ironwork, spar ornaments and cement render – whereas the nineteenth gave Derby heavy and railway engineering, iron and brass founding, narrow tapes, silk trimmings, and brickmaking alongside continuing prestige manufactures.

The last century saw many of both types of these industries decline, especially the heavy industry, although the coming of Rolls-Royce cleverly combined ‘high-end’ products with a new aspect of engineering: the automotive. That, driven by the exigences of conflict, gradually mutated from luxury cars into aerospace. In the present era, aerospace continues, whilst the decline and reinvigoration (through denationalisation) of the railways has revived many aspects of railway engineering, now almost as high-tech as aerospace, along with related developments including those connected to the digital age, in themselves an element of a totally new industrial revolution.

All this has led to a continuous growth in population, which itself presents considerable challenges, and has driven environmental loss and renewal just as powerfully as the demands of industrial change. The key to achieving a balance between necessary development and harmful destruction of historic environments is to acknowledge the need to provide for quality of life and the retention of an urban environment which remain humane in scale.

In the early 1970s there was much destruction of historic buildings and environments going on in Derby, but without much in prospect to replace them, leaving only empty spaces, frequently turned into ad hoc car parks. Come the prosperity ushered in during the 1980s, the battle then was to get new buildings on these sites of real quality, but this was often a losing battle.

Today the fight is to get