The Brynmawr Rubber Factory - A concrete masterpiece

As a rule I try to use only my own pictures on this blog - but on this occasion I'll have to make an exception because I'm 14 years to late to take any myself. So, thanks to everyone who has posted material on the web about this remarkable factory which used to nestle in a Welsh valley at Brynmawr

From www.coflein.gov.uk:

The now demolished (in 2001) Brynmawr Rubber Factory was an exceptionally fine example of 'Festival of Britain' period architecture. Built between 1945 and 1951, with later additions, the most impressive original feature was the multi-domed concrete roofing over the main first floor working area. It was the first post-1939 building in Wales to be listed, and was given a II* grading in recognition of its outstanding importance. The associated boiler house stood nearby and to the south of the reservoir was a valve tower, both were designed in a similar style.

From the Daily Telegraph, July 2002:

The Brynmawr rubber factory near Ebbw Vale in South Wales should probably never have been built, at least not where they built it. The architects should not have troubled themselves to make it so elegant and monumental.

Ravaged by unemployment and poverty during the 1930s, the South Wales coalfields were an urgent target for industrial regeneration after the war. Socialist peer and businessman Jim Forrester persuaded Clement Attlee's government to invest in a new factory. Designed by the Architects' Co-Operative Partnership under the American Michael Powers, and engineered by the brilliant Dane Ove Arup, the factory was a huge, open space covered by nine, thin concrete domes, like Roman baths or a Byzantine shrine.

The architectural language was a distinctly British dialect of European modernism. An unembarrassed use of new materials and a dislike of ornament went hand-in-hand with a pretty distribution of planes and windows and an emphasis on unobstructed spaces and downward-drifting natural light.

The collectivist ideology of the post-war settlement informed the entire design. Bosses and workers came in through the same entrance, and ate in the same canteen. The open-plan shop floor implied the exaltation of manual work into some great ritual, an idea also evident in Soviet industrial architecture of the period.

Unfortunately, the site was too remote from the rest of the world. And the rubber boom which Forrester envisaged never materialised.

Brynmawr never employed more than a quarter of the 1,000 hoped-for workers. After just a year of operation, the factory was sold to Dunlop in 1952. It limped along for another three decades before closing in 1982. The Government listed it Grade II four years later.

Subsequent schemes for turning it into some kind of stately pleasure dome foundered on the cost of restoring and stabilising the building and on the fact that the neighbouring communities, as poor now as ever, were not the stuff of a venture capitalist's wildest fantasies. Amid much local and national controversy, the local authority delisted it in 1996, and most of it has now been demolished to make way for a mixed residential-commercial development of the kind that the area probably needs, but which will win few architectural awards.

The moral of the story is - well, you tell me. If your water feature is being vetoed by English Heritage because of some Jacobean paving-stone in its way you might find this a comforting story. The Welsh authorities' unsentimental attitude to bricks and mortar doesn't make them bad people, just a bit philistine. Nobody else came through with enough cash to retain the building in a new role. And, since architectural history is not part of the National Curriculum, the children of the rubber-makers probably only ever saw the factory as a symbol of repression, clocking Dad on and off, day after day.