the first book in English on industrial archaeology (Hudson 1963) and editor of the first journal on the subject, whose object was to draw attention to the surviving monuments of our industrial past, which also appeared in 1963.

Industrial archaeology flourished in Britain in the latter part of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Some important museums and other conservation projects were established during the period, including the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Shropshire, the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, and the Morwellham Quay Open Air Museum. Many books, particularly the series The Industrial Archaeology of the British Isles published by David and Charles of Newton Abbot, England, documented those monuments of the British industrial past that could readily be recognized, while aparallel series examined the evolution of canals and railways on a regional basis. A succession of books (Buchanan 1972; Butt and Donnachie 1979; Cossons 1988; Falconer 1980; Minchinton 1984; Raistrick 1972) surveyed the subject from a national perspective.

Renewed interest in the monuments of industrial history was part of a wider revival of concern in Britain with aspects of the nation’s past, which had been disparaged in the decades of imperial pomp between the 1870s and World War II. The interest was paralleled by new serious concerns about the history of local communities, the history of landscapes (Beresford 1957; Hoskins 1955), and buildings such as dissenting chapels and railway stations that had been ignored by historians of architecture who had concentrated instead on country houses and Anglican churches.

The beginnings of this movement can be traced to before World War II and were exemplified in some of the poems of John Betjeman (1906–1984) who wrote with affection about London suburbs; in the work of officially commissioned war artists, among them John Piper (1903–), who painted the Iron Bridge and the Coalbrookdale ironworks; and in the school of documentary filmmakers who produced such masterpieces as Basil Wright’s (1907–1987) Night Mail in 1936 and Humphrey Jennings’s (1907–1950) Diary for Timothy in 1945. Two of the leading figures of the documentary movement directly influenced the development of industrial archaeology: Jennings, as an anthologist of descriptive writing of the Industrial Revolution (Jennings 1985), and Sir Arthur Elton (1906–1973), a collector of images of industrialization.

The new attitudes were exemplified in the series of guidebooks About Britain published for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and edited by Geoffrey Grigson, who wrote:

The Festival shows how the British people, with their energy and natural resources, contribute to civilisation. So the guidebooks as well celebrate a European country alert, ready for the future, and strengthened by a tradition which you can see in its remarkable monuments and products of history and even prehistory. If the country includes Birmingham, Glasgow or Belfast, it includes Stonehenge. If it contains Durham Cathedral, it contains coal mines, iron foundries and the newest of factories devising all the goods of a developing civilisation

(Hoskins 1951).

The growing concern for industrial history in Britain was fostered by university adult education classes and summer schools and the Association for Industrial Archaeology, a national organization that was founded in 1973 as a result of a series of conferences held at the University of Bath. Interest in the subject was sustained by the success of preservation societies that brought back traffic to derelict canals and rivers and reopened steam railways as tourist attractions (Mackersey 1985; Rolt 1953, 1977; Squires 1983; Winton 1986). Such schemes owed much to the spirit of community service that had flourished during World War II, in which, as in the Home Guard or the Women’s Voluntary Service movement, volunteers had been organized under “expert” leadership.

In industrial archaeology, as in the voluntary conservation organizations, there was a tendency to reject professional expertise and to delight in amateurism. L.T.C. Rolt (1910–1974), a pioneer in industrial archaeology as well as in railway preservation and waterways restoration,