Industrial Monuments: A Protection Programme

The Archaeology of the Rural Railway Warehouse in North-West England

“…7 Unfortunately this art-historical view prevailed until the 1990s, an opportunity to address the subject archaeologically being missed by the Monuments Protection Programme in the 1980s and 1990s which was unable to begin its review of railway archaeology before the programme closed. 8 Yet rail transport was identifi ed by the AIA as an industry undergoing drastic reorganisation and thus threatening the standing historic monuments in 1991, whilst Stratton and Trinder noted the importance of rail distribution to industrialisation in their study of Industrial England in 1997 and Morriss' 1999 book on the archaeology of railways had a short chapter on goods depots and railway warehouses. 9 Although railway warehouses were a vital element of the railway machine, since 1999 they have been little studied by industrial archaeologists outside the confi nes of the planning process.…”