Housing

NEW LANARK VILLAGE HOUSING

General Information

When David Dale and his partner, Sir Richard Arkwright, took the decision to build their new cotton mills at New Lanark, commuting to work was unheard of. Thus, Dale had to provide Housing for the entire workforce and such an undertaking was going to be far from easy to complete.
According to the O.S.A., written in 1795, a workforce of 90 stonemasons, joiners and labourers had been “working for a total of 10 years to complete the mills and the houses”. This length of time reflects the relative isolation of the site and the difficulty of construction so close to the River Clyde.
Tall tenements were the obvious solution to the shortage of building room and the imposing stone-built tenements with their rows of small-paned windows are classic examples of rural, industrial architecture.
The masons were faced with an additional problem - the contours of the land in the river valley meant that the tenements had to have at least one floor under street level, with windows facing the south only.
The stonework is a style known as “random rubble”. The locally quarried sandstone was not cut into regular blocks, but instead the natural shapes of the stones were used at random, something similar to a dry-stone dyke.
Roofing was initially of thatch but this was quickly replaced by slate roofs as such roofing was found to be far less prone to catching fire.

The earliest houses appear to have been at Caithness Row and then the housing closest to the mills may have been added in order, hence Double Row, Wee Row, Long Row and Braxfield Row.

In addition to the rows of tenements designed to house the village workers, two detached houses were also constructed. One of these was used by Dale when he stayed in the village; the other may have been occupied by James Dale, a half-brother of David Dale, whom the latter employed to manage the mills on his behalf. Later both houses were used by successive managers, the most famous of which was Robert Owen, who took up residency in the house which now bears his name today.