Description

Circa 1792. 2-storey to N, 3 to S due to falling ground, 42-bay terrace, gabled at W end and piended at E, containing mill workers' houses, one room deep. Random rubble with droved ashlar dressings. Long and short quoins. Regular fenestration with tabbed margins. Symmetrical 3-bay units, each with central door and flanking windows to both N and S elevations.

12-pane glazing in timber sash and case windows. Ashlar-coped ridge stacks with small black cans. Grey slate roof. Cast-iron rainwater goods.

Statement of Interest

Long Row is an important component of the village and mill complex. It is the longest continuous terrace in New Lanark and has an impressive but severe appearance, though this is alleviated by the warm colour and rough texture of the stone. It is likely that there was a variety of house size within the terrace. By 1903 there was one house of 3 apartments, 8 houses of 2 apartments and 20 of one apartment.

Long Row together with the other terraces of housing demonstrates Dale's ingenious solution to the problem of planning his Utopian village. The housing provided for the workers in New Lanark is particularly important as it is not typical of social housing of the 18th century. Many planned settlements for the accommodation of workers sprang up in the age of improvement all over Scotland ' for example, at Charlestown (Fife), Grantown-on-Spey, Newcastleton and Inveraray. Generally the buildings were low rise and arranged in a grid plan around formal squares focussed on public buildings. Unlike many other planned villages in Scotland, the topography of the New Lanark site prevented low-rise. The solution was to build tall blocks of houses. These stacked tenement-like structures prefigure the City Improvement scheme and other tenements which appeared in the cities in the second half of the 19th century. Later mill complexes such as Stanley and Catrine returned to the more conventional grid of two-storey blocks.

New Lanark was a pioneering cotton-spinning village, which became a model for industrial communities that was to spread across the world in the 19th and 20th centuries and is recognised as being of outstanding importance historically and in visual terms because of its completeness and its physical form. Elements of sophisticated early town planning are evidenced in the orchestration of the various components in the village, from the mill weir, its lade and tunnel to south, to the tunnels and sluices leading off to the individual mills, the crucially generous circulation spaces, gardens, tailored walks and viewing points realised from the start. It is surrounded by an incomparable natural and designed landscape, the mill buildings sitting on the natural terrace to the east of the River Clyde in this deeply incised, wooded river valley.

Built to exploit the water power offered by the Falls of Clyde, the mills were in operation from 1786 to 1968. The mill village is made up of industrial, residential and community buildings, dating predominantly from between 1786 and the 1820s. The mill was founded by David Dale, a Glasgow merchant, in conjunction with Richard Arkwright, a trailblazing inventor of the cotton spinning industry whose patents enabled operation on a considerable scale. Dale's humane philosophy, realised from the start in the buildings of New Lanark, was expanded by Robert Owen, who took over management of the mill village in partnership from 1799. Owen created an environment where child labour and corporal punishment were abolished, and provided workers with good homes, education and free health care as well as affordable food. He had a profound influence on social developments such as factory reform throughout the 19th century.

Long Row was restored in 1977 as 14 houses, 10 of which are privately owned, the other 4 being tenancies of the Housing Association.

Within World Heritage Site inscribed 2001.

List description updated 2010.

External Links

• Historic Environment Scotland Listing
• Wikidata Q17571724

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

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  For the Record