Abstract
A proliferation of craft breweries in recent years make the image of a large Guinness brewery in London’s Zone 3 an almost improbable thought. The closure of Guinness’ Park Royal Brewery represents a more poignant memory in the UK’s industrial history, however, and is the focus of Tim Strangleman’s latest study in Voices of Guinness; affectionately referred to as ‘the Guinness book’. Except Strangleman’s study of the Park Royal Brewery is not just a snapshot of plant closure. Rather, he offers an extensive exploration through time, starting, quite literally, at the beginning in the 1930s when the brewery was built until its closure in 2005 and beyond.
Combining methods such as oral history, company magazines, archival material and photography illuminates the Park Royal Brewery in multiple though complementary ways, creating a vivid picture for readers both textually and visually. Aside from the richness of the subject matter, the study is an intricately executed piece of qualitative research. Strangleman takes care in explaining the significance of his methodological approach, emphasising the relevance of different methods at different times in the Park Royal story. Debates connected to each method are reviewed and justified in the context of the empirical focus throughout. Being guided through data collection and analysis in depth in this manner is refreshing, given there is often limited space to expound on qualitative matters in academic journals. A fruitful source of data discussed in the book is the staff magazine, Guinness Time, that ran from 1947 to 1975 and covered topics such as brewery life, community, and work and non-work activities. Each edition began with an editorial and photo essay that illustrated aspects of the labour process at the brewery, and included occupations such as brewery production, cleaners, transport staff, builders and payroll clerks. The magazine allowed staff to gain an understanding of the wide scope of activities that took place at Park Royal, arguably fostering an enhanced sense of solidarity and empathy among workers throughout the brewery. Strangleman usefully analyses the significance of Guinness Time from the perspective of the employer and the workforce.
Reflecting on a lecture by TH Marshall in 1949 Strangleman frames Guinness Time through the lens of constructing ‘industrial citizenship’, which is understood as ‘a civic identity derived from employment and the social and political relationships of the workplace’ (p. 32). For Guinness, industrial citizenship was essential to not only be viewed as a ‘good employer’ but to create a ‘model workforce’ by establishing a nurturing environment for workers that contributed to the development of their individual character. Although it is acknowledged that Guinness Time was largely a social construction by management, its role in corporate image making nonetheless reveals the types of values, norms and expectations that shaped the employment relationship at Guinness. Strangleman notes that the intent of Guinness Time was more liberal than might be implied by notions of citizenship, as it stressed that workers should be afforded considerable autonomy in order to elicit greater freedom and individuality at work. From interviews with workers, or ‘Guinness Citizens’, Strangleman highlights how these liberal ideals were enabled through a collective understanding of work that was embedded in the way ‘social relationships overlaid and underpinned the mechanical act of labour’ (p. 103). That is, the sense of community among workers at Guinness provided the conditions for citizenship to prosper.
It would be remiss not to celebrate the use of the visual in this book. At the end of Chapters 3 and 5 we are treated to a series of images and photographs sourced from a mixture of the Guinness Archive and individual photographers (including Strangleman himself). These images present us with depictions of life at Park Royal, both in terms of the scope of the labour processes involved in brewing but also workplace ceremonies and the eventual demolition of the brewery. In Chapter 3 discussions of the landscape surrounding Park Royal further illuminate our understanding of industrial citizenship. The pastoral setting of the Park Royal site lent itself the description as the ‘garden city brewery’, located in more than a hundred acres of landscaped parkland, gardens, leisure facilities, pasture and farmland. While the elaboration of the surrounding physical environment of factories is criticised for being a feature of managerial control strategies, Strangleman counters this by emphasising the complexity of industry’s relationship to wider society and the possibilities that landscaped factories offer in relation to the ‘reenchantment and imagination’ of work (p. 69). Integrating discussion of social and physical environments is what makes the analysis so powerful, illustrating the relevance of the industrial-geographical dynamics of work. Strangleman’s approach in Voices of Guinness thus sets a standard for examining how memories of work and loss elide into contemporary experiences of work, and how this shapes understanding of our wider communities.
