New Lanark UNESCO Village
New Lanark is a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the banks of the River Clyde in South Lanarkshire, a planned cotton mill community of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was the site of one of the most remarkable social experiments in British industrial history. The village was founded by the Glasgow merchant David Dale in 1786 to house the workforce of his cotton mills powered by the falls of the Clyde, and was subsequently managed from 1800 by his son-in-law Robert Owen, a Welsh-born mill manager turned social reformer who transformed New Lanark into an internationally celebrated demonstration of humane industrial management. Owen's achievement at New Lanark was to prove, at a time when industrial capitalism was developing its most exploitative forms, that a well-housed, educated and fairly treated workforce could be more productive than one subjected to the harsh conditions common elsewhere. He built decent housing for workers, established the Institute for the Formation of Character as a community and educational facility, created Britain's first infant school, provided free healthcare and introduced a system of mutual insurance. Visitors came from across Europe and North America to observe the experiment, and Owen's New Lanark became one of the foundational texts of the co-operative and socialist movements. The mill buildings, workers' housing and community facilities of the Owen period survive in extraordinary completeness, having been conserved and partially restored since the 1970s after a period of decline following the closure of the mills. The New Lanark Trust has created a visitor attraction from the heritage buildings that includes a hotel, self-catering accommodation and a comprehensive museum experience explaining Owen's vision and its legacy for the modern welfare state and co-operative movement. The position of the village at the foot of the Clyde Gorge with the Falls of Clyde immediately upstream adds an exceptional natural setting to the already remarkable heritage significance.