Factory Tourism in Inter-war Britain: The Spectacular Construction of Social-Democratic Mass Production

In the 1920s and 1930s, many British manufacturers opened their factories to hundreds of thousands of ordinary consumers. In part, this was a response to an increasingly competitive market for branded household commodities, in which visitors were offered an entertaining day out and mechanical wonderment in hopeful exchange for their loyalty at the grocers. But the organised tours had a deeper and more significant purpose as a riposte to the rise of radical consumerism and popular discomfort at monopoly combines. Factory tours worked hard to present capitalist mass production as a form of social-democratic progress, constructing a vision of mass production and mass consumption as the twin engines of a more equitable, abundant and democratic society. This essay provides the first systematic engagement with inter-war mass factory tourism, exploring the four most popular destinations: Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight; Cadbury at Bournville; Rowntree at York; and Fry at Somerdale. In particular, it notes the contradiction in transforming monotonous factory work into a source of spectacular pleasure, and examines the common techniques used to disavow this tension and construct a vision of social-democratic mass production.