Professor Angus Buchanan and the early days of Industrial Archaeology

In 2014 Professor Buchanan wrote:

Industrial archaeology was not a completely novel concept in the 1950s, but it emerged in response to the unusual conditions of the years immediately after the Second World War … The critical point in the arousing of public consciousness to the serious losses of irreplaceable cultural material was the compete renewal of Euston Station …

This is where I came in, because having been appointed as an Assistant Lecturer at the Bristol College of Science and Technology on it becoming a ‘College of Advanced Technology’ (CAT) in 1960, I joined the new General Studies Department and was made responsible for teaching classes of engineers and applied scientists some social and industrial history.

Searching for a way of bridging the perceived gap between the ‘Two Cultures’ which had recently been established in the public mind by C. P. Snow, I identified a way of doing this through the history of technology and with the support of the College, the Centre for the Study of the History of Technology was set up in 1964.

Click on the images below to find out more or visit the exhibition gallery by clicking on the link to the right.