Michael Nevell – författare

Representing the first substantial English-language text on Industrial Archaeology in a decade, this handbook comes at a time when the global impact of industrialization is being re-assessed in terms of its legacy of climate change, mechanization, urbanization, the forced migration of peoples, and labour relations. Critical debates around the beginning of a new geological era - The Anthropocene - have emerged over the last decade. This approach interrogates the widespread exploitation of natural resources that forged industrialization from its early emergence in 18th century northern Europe to its contemporary ubiquity, environmental impacts, and social legacy within our globalized world.Through a broad international and multi-period set of chapters, this volume explores the complex origins, processes, and development of industrialization through both its physical remains and human consequences - both the good and the bad. It provides a diverse material framework for understanding our modern world, from its industrial origins through its future paths in the 21st century.

The Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire is one of the cradles of industrialisation. At its heart is the Iron Bridge spanning the River Severn, one of the world’s first iron bridges and an iconic image of the Industrial Revolution. The area’s role in helping to transform Britain into the world’s first industrial society earned it UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1986. Industrialisation in and around the gorge was shaped and constrained by the landscape and this is reflected in the range of extractive, manufacturing, and transport sites in the area. These include Abraham Darby’s coke-fired iron furnace of 1709, the first steel furnace in England at the Upper Forge, brick and tile works, canals, tramways, and workers’ housing.The Archaeology of Ironbridge Gorge in 20 Digs explores a range of sites and material evidence excavated from the 1970s to the 2010s. It combines archaeological excavation with the analysis of the industrial and domestic buildings that helped to create the Ironbridge industrial community, and which continue to form an integral part of this internationally important twenty-first-century landscape.

Cheshire contains some of the earliest inland saltworks, industrial canals, and purpose-built mechanised textile mills in Britain. The region’s industrial story covers 2,000 years from the Romans to the Victorians and beyond. Drawing upon archaeological excavations over the last fifty years, this book looks at the physical remains of Cheshire’s chief industries, salt, textiles, metal working, and transport, from its Roman beginnings to the area’s role as the centre of Britain’s silk industry in the nineteenth century. Michael Nevell describes the excavation of Cheshire’s internationally important industrial archaeology sites showing how this archaeological work has helped the study of not only the salt industries of Nantwich, Middlewich, and Northwich, but Chester’s role as a port, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Bridgewater Canal, the first long-distance industrial canal, and its port at Runcorn. The area’s largest industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, silk and cotton spinning, developed in eastern Cheshire and this area became Britain’s silk-manufacturing centre. The excavation of these textile mills, salt works, and transport networks reveals the impact of industrialisation on the landscape and people of the area, and Cheshire’s important role in the Industrial Revolution.

Manchester was the world’s first industrial city, the shock city of the Victorian age. Its nineteenth-century dominance of world cotton production, as Cottonopolis, saw its city region emerge as one of the largest urban areas in Europe. The city continues to re-invent itself in the post-industrial era, but there is a rich industrial heritage legacy that is still visible, from the Northern Quarter to Ardwick. There are dozens of eighteenth-century weavers’ cottages hiding in plain sight, whilst many of the textile mills of Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock, often converted into apartments, still stand as markers of the city’s role as a textile-manufacturing colossus. Elsewhere in the city, you can find buildings associated with brewing, glass-making, electricity generation, warehousing, and water supply, often in the shadow of the of the twenty-first-century city’s renaissance. Its internationally important canal and railway buildings and structures, saved during the 1970s and 1980s, now provide offices, homes, and leisure facilities for the growing city-centre population. In this wide-ranging book Michael Nevell provides an overview of the surprising and often breathtaking survival of Manchester’s industrial face, helping to tell the physical story of the world’s first industrial city.

Large-scale redevelopment at Kingsway Business Park, near Rochdale, and Cutacre Country Park, near Bolton, has provided an important opportunity to investigate the prehistoric and later rural landscapes in the south-eastern corner of the historic county of Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester. A combination of archaeological techniques has been employed to explore the archaeology of these areas, principally comprising standing-building survey and open-area excavation, directed towards the investigation of 17 sites. Topographical survey and palaeoenvironmental coring were also used to examine the character of the early landscape. Evidence for prehistoric and medieval activity was discovered within the two areas, although the majority of the remains investigated dated to the post-medieval and industrial periods. These latter remains relate to a range of different rural house types and farm buildings, built by the lesser gentry, and the yeoman and tenant farmers of the region. This volume is the result of a multi-disciplinary approach to the archaeology, with the work of a range of authors from Oxford Archaeology and the University of Salford, and also several external specialists. The results greatly enhance an understanding of the archaeology of Greater Manchester, and, more generally, provide important information on rural settlement in north-west England.