This is the third post in our Urban and Environmental Dialogues series, published in collaboration with The Metropole.
On the 18th April 1849 Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (husband of Queen Victoria) laid the foundation stone of the Royal Docks, Grimsby. The town in North-East Lincolnshire, England, had been growing into a significant port over the previous fifty years or so; its position at the mouth of the River Humber gave it direct access to the sea, whereas the more established port city of Hull lay inland at the confluence of the Humber and the River Hull. Albert said:
“We have been laying the foundation not only of a Dock, as a place of refuge, safety and refitment for mercantile shipping, and calculated even to receive the largest steamers in Her Majesty’s Navy, but it may be, and I hope it will be, the foundation of a great commercial port, destined in after time, when we shall have long quitted the scene, and when our names even may be forgotten, to form another centre of life to the vast and ever-increasing commerce of the world and an important link in the connection of the East and the West. Nay, if I contemplate the extraordinary rapidity of development which characterizes the undertakings of this age, it may not even be too much to expect that some of us may yet live to see this prospect in part realized.”1
He praised the fact that the work was being carried out by private enterprise with an eye to the national interest, and expressed pleasure at being in Lincolnshire, “so celebrated for its agricultural pursuits,” for the first time. His speech connects histories of land management to sea trade, and the dock emerges as a distinctive space through which the world (imagined through commodities) is gathered together. It is a site of mastery over the things and wealth of the Earth. This post will focus on one structure in the docks to think about the place of buildings within environmental relations.
In this postcard Grimsby’s Dock Tower looms over the surrounding docks. Architecturally it was modeled on Palazzo Publico in Sienna, and this contrasts with the more functional forms of the boats and the dockside. The tower shoots up like an elaborate needle trying to pierce the sky, while the machinery of the fish trade moves around its base. To a casual observer it is not clear what purpose it might serve: it is far taller than most lighthouses, the most obvious use for such a structure. In fact, it is a hydraulic tower, the power from which once operated the machinery (such as gates and cranes) of the docks. It was designed by William Armstrong, and the tower’s great height was needed to generate sufficient hydraulic force. Armstrong developed accumulator towers that rapidly superseded this design, making it the only example built to this specific design, although other hydraulic towers exist. The machinery of the Royal Docks, then, not only organized watery space by creating fixed points on which to land goods but was itself in a sense powered by water as its opening and closing, as well as the movement of goods between boat and landing place, was hydraulically managed. This building is the beating heart of an infrastructural system.
“This building is the beating heart of an infrastructural system.”
Infrastructure is a nineteenth-century French word, originally meaning the packed ground created to lay railway lines on. Fairly rapidly it expanded to apply in a broad sense to material systems that support or underpin something else, often something involving the movement of goods, people or energy. It entered English by the 1920s through military use. In contemporary scholarship across several disciplines, including anthropology, art history and geography, the term has been taken up for use in analysis and critique of modernization. This work has portrayed infrastructure as a contested mode of making and shaping space that offers possibilities for understanding the aims of the powerful, whether states or commercial entities, or for resistance to these.2 Older ideas of infrastructure as a category that only attracts attention when it fails have now largely been debunked although this is certainly a feature of some kinds of infrastructure in some settings, most commonly those connected to waste and sanitation.3 Certainly the tower is a piece of infrastructure, and one that is not at all hidden.
Albert looked forward to Grimsby becoming a world-leading port. In his speech he did not specify any particular commodities, and indeed Grimsby was an all purpose port with an extensive trade in, for example, timber. Nevertheless, through the second half of the nineteenth century it grew to become one of the world’s leading fishing ports, taking a key role in a distinctive knot of infrastructure that supplied the growing cities of Britain with fresh fish.
Various technological developments changed fishing in the nineteenth century, and this amounted to a shift in the ecological relations between life in the ocean and on land. Nets that had been made of hemp were increasingly made of cotton, and the reduction in weight meant that they could be larger. Early steamships were too small to themselves be used as fishing vessels, but they were used as support vessels: they would go and back and forth between the fleet and land, carrying off the fresh catch and keeping the larger ships supplied with food and necessities as well as more illicit goods.4 On land, railways connected the coasts to the growing cities, allowing far more rapid transport of fresh fish, further aided by a large trade in ice.
“Grimsby’s Dock Tower, a key piece of infrastructure in the extraction of life from the seas and its distribution on land, is a reminder that buildings are individual points within complex webs of entanglement.”
Grimsby’s Dock Tower, a key piece of infrastructure in the extraction of life from the seas and its distribution on land, is a reminder that buildings are individual points within complex webs of entanglement. It was made by changes in fishing activities at sea and circulation technologies on land. Indeed it was itself part of these circulation technologies. I have argued elsewhere that the conceptual boundary of the city cannot hold, that its material and environmental walls are always porous.5 Grimsby’s Dock Tower demonstrates something of what this means in practice: specific sites are shaped by the intersections of multiple trajectories, near and far.
Feature Image: Plan of Grimsby, 1879, including plans for new docks and land reclamation. Only one of the proposed new docks was constructed and the sea was never drained. North-East Lincolnshire Archives 282/126.
Notes
1 Prince Albert at the laying of the first stone of the Great Grimsby Docks, 18 April 1849. From Addresses delivered on different public occasions by His Royal Highness the Prince Albert (Royal Society of Arts, 1857).
2 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43049305; Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014); Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, First published by Verso 2021 (London New York: Verso, 2021).
3 On these see Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Creating the North American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
4 Spencer Walpole, Handbooks Issued in Connection with The Great International Fisheries Exhibition: The British Fish Trade (London: William Clowes and Sons Limited, 1883).
5 Sam Grinsell, ‘Cities Are a Borderland Where the Wild and Built Worlds Meet’, Aeon, 30 July 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/cities-are-a-borderland-where-the-wild-and-built-worlds-meet.
