The industrial district of the town known as Sweden's Manchester
looks remarkably open, pristine, free of smog, dirt and hard-pressed masses of workers. But in earlier centuries massive gates sealed off this industrial zone.
Only those obliged to work there, alongside wagons carrying raw materials, such as logs, cotton bales and wool, were allowed to pass through. A prison used for forced labour marked off its western boundary. Unmarried women as well as children were locked up and made to card and spin wool for the mills.
Norrköping was second only to Stockholm as the centre of the Swedish industrial revolution between 1830 and 1850 and the most important workers' town until the factory closures in the 1950s.
Norrköping's prison still overlooks the tightly packed workshops, sheds and mills, which line the banks of the river Motala. The landscape seems virtually unrecognisable to those who remember it from its former days. Where crowds of workers rushed to work in the deafening clatter of the looms, now over 6,000 students attend lectures.
At the east end, the Louis de Geer concert hall provides a dramatic setting for Norrköping's Symphony Orchestra within the vast walls of a former paper mill. By night, spectacular light displays make the rapids and waterfalls shimmer and glow.
The Motala's fast-flowing waters have powered the town's manufacturing since the early middle ages. Over a half-mile stretch, the river drops by 60 feet. Curiously, it was the river - the soul of the town, in curator Anette Kindahl's view - that saved the industrial landscape from demolition.
'When the factories finally shut down, most of the workers, like my mother, were bitter about the harsh life they had endured and their low status,' says Kindahl, who works at the City Museum. 'They saw the whole place as a symbol of industrial decline, unemployment and oppression and wanted it to be torn down.'
A plan to replace the six old power stations with a single new one in 1980 caused concern. Water was to be channelled away from the Motala into a tunnel, which would have reduced the river to stagnant pools.
This was overruled by a court judgement, which set the minimum rate of water flow through the rapids and made the maintenance of the old dams compulsory. The scene was thus set for architects and others to encourage locals to 'look up from the river to the buildings on its banks'.
Ann-Charlotte Hertz, the curator of ancient monuments at the City Museum, has been involved with every stage of the industrial landscape project for three decades. 'At first it wasn't the people of Norrköping who felt that the buildings should be saved from demolition,' she says. 'It took outsiders from Stockholm and elsewhere to see it as a valuable entity comparable to the Ruhr and similar areas in the UK.
'Initially there was unregulated demolition by the Holmen building company. But in the end it was the recession of the early 1990s which saved the area and gave us time to consider what to do. The National Heritage Board, the County Board in Linköping and the factory
owners got together to find a better way for everyone concerned.'
Eventually it became Sweden's largest urban renewal project. One of the main lessons of the whole experience, in Hertz' view, is that you can't plan everything. 'Time brings things you just can't foresee. We never thought that there would be a university here, for example. What we do need is more jobs so that students can stay here after they complete their courses.'
Awareness and appreciation of not only the industrial architecture but also the lives of ordinary people is without doubt a special feature of Swedish culture. The preservation of industrial landscapes and documentation of people's working lives owes much to pioneers like Artur Hazelius who in 1891 founded the Skansen 'folk park' in Stockholm.
Skansen remains the grandaddy of all such enterprises - combining history, nature and recreation. Sweden's unique contribution to this type of development has been noted by specialists like Peter Lewis, the former director of the Beamish open-air museum in County Durham.
Lewis has admired the impressive but unassuming way in which past and present are combined in the open-air museum at the region's capital in Linköping, only 20 minutes away.
Popular writers like Vilhelm Moberg, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinson and others helped create a powerful self-awareness amongst working people in the 1920s and 1930s. A statue of Martinson, whose novels focused on the harsh life of Norrköping's female workers, adorns the industrial landscape.
Later in the 20th century, writer Sven Linqvist launched the 'dig where you stand' history-from-below movement, an approach which influenced Eric Hofrén, who became the first director of Norrköping's Museum of Work.
Hofrén believed that the new mu-seum's 'starting point will always be today's working conditions and the question of who is in power. Our museum is not only about reaction and reconstruction, but also about action and construction', he told an international museum conference in the early 1990s. He wanted the museum to become 'a cheeky voice' that would dream about and change the future of labour.
'The idea first came up in the late 1970s,' says Anders Lindh, the director of the Museum of Work or Arbetets Museum as it is called in Swedish. It was established as a foundation in 1983 by five trade union bodies.
The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) eventually provided a splendid site in the shape of the extraordinary flat-iron or Strykjärnet former factory building that juts up from rocks in the middle of the Motala river like a floating island. Its 7,000-square-metre seven floors of space opened to the public in 1991 with free admission.
The LO continues to subsidise the museum by charging a low rent.
The Arbetets Museum is a member of Worklab, the International Association of Labour Museums to which Manchester's Museum of People's History also belongs. Swedish central government provides 60 per cent of its budget.
The remaining 40 per cent is raised from partners and external sources. Around 200,000 people visit each year, with nearly half coming from Norrköping and only 3 per cent from abroad.
'Our beginning was here,' Lindh says. 'We hope we can stay here. Our role is to initiate good ideas and help people have a sense of where they come from.'
It is unique in not having a permanent collection of objects. Its mission is 'to collect and document working life - its history, its places, the people, their memories and stories', he says. 'We ask people to send us their written memories. Then we send photographers and artists to work with them, and the results are published in books, seminars and exhibitions.
'Last month, for example, we opened a touring exhibition about what it is like to be a homosexual person in working life. We now have 50 people's stories in this project, which is in collaboration with gay people's organisations.
'We don't keep most of the original documents. Usually we send them back to their owners or to the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. Not being tied to objects gives us more freedom and flexibility.'
The museum is preparing a major exhibition, to be launched in 2007, documenting Sweden's transition from agriculture to industry, and finally, looking at today's information society.
'Society is more complex today,' says Lindh. 'Sweden has gone from a "land of industry", where optimism about progress prevailed, to a situation where people are more depressed because there is no work for many who lost their jobs at the age of 55.'
Deputy director and head of exhibitions, Mikael Parr, shares Lindh's aim of 'starting with the here and now, and why we are here'. 'We look at working conditions which are political issues,' he says. 'But we are not connected with a political party and our board of trustees never tells us what to do.
'Our aim is to raise questions about the present and the future and stimulate debate. The documenting of working conditions has been a successful formula. We run a wide range of exhibitions that are attended by 300 groups of school pupils each year. Many students contact us to present their ideas on different subjects.'
Over the last decade, many throughout the country have been inspired by the Arbetets Museum. There are now over 1,300 museums of working life in Sweden, some 1,100 of which are documented in the third edition of a guide book compiled by Jan af Geijerstam published a few months ago.
That's a lot for a country of nine million people. mj
Corinna Lotz is a freelance arts journalist
Museum of Work
Norrköping's City Museum is linked by a small bridge to the Museum of Work. When it opened in 1981 the City Museum was the first in the industrial landscape to occupy former industrial premises. In premises once used for weaving and dyeing staff demonstrate how the old looms function amid deafening noise.
A maze of buildings houses Sweden's largest exhibition of arts and crafts. Fifty different trades, including coopering, cartwrighting, blacksmithing, cobbling and tailoring, are illustrated in imaginative tableaux.
The museum boasts a collection of 400,000 vintage photographs of the town, 150,000 of which are now on a database. Its lively restaurant attracts a wide clientele.
The Holmen Paper Museum, which opened in 1996, occupies a 350-square-metre space on Laxholmen Island. It is on the same site where the first hand-made paper mill opened in 1633 by Louis de Geer, the Dutch industrialist who was King Gustav Adolf's arms supplier in the Thirty Years War.
Located as it was next to the textile mills, the paper factory had a ready supply of waste fabric. The museum is operated on a volunteer basis by a group of 25 former Holmen employees who demonstrate how paper is made.
looks remarkably open, pristine, free of smog, dirt and hard-pressed masses of workers. But in earlier centuries massive gates sealed off this industrial zone.
Only those obliged to work there, alongside wagons carrying raw materials, such as logs, cotton bales and wool, were allowed to pass through. A prison used for forced labour marked off its western boundary. Unmarried women as well as children were locked up and made to card and spin wool for the mills.
Norrköping was second only to Stockholm as the centre of the Swedish industrial revolution between 1830 and 1850 and the most important workers' town until the factory closures in the 1950s.
Norrköping's prison still overlooks the tightly packed workshops, sheds and mills, which line the banks of the river Motala. The landscape seems virtually unrecognisable to those who remember it from its former days. Where crowds of workers rushed to work in the deafening clatter of the looms, now over 6,000 students attend lectures.
At the east end, the Louis de Geer concert hall provides a dramatic setting for Norrköping's Symphony Orchestra within the vast walls of a former paper mill. By night, spectacular light displays make the rapids and waterfalls shimmer and glow.
The Motala's fast-flowing waters have powered the town's manufacturing since the early middle ages. Over a half-mile stretch, the river drops by 60 feet. Curiously, it was the river - the soul of the town, in curator Anette Kindahl's view - that saved the industrial landscape from demolition.
'When the factories finally shut down, most of the workers, like my mother, were bitter about the harsh life they had endured and their low status,' says Kindahl, who works at the City Museum. 'They saw the whole place as a symbol of industrial decline, unemployment and oppression and wanted it to be torn down.'
A plan to replace the six old power stations with a single new one in 1980 caused concern. Water was to be channelled away from the Motala into a tunnel, which would have reduced the river to stagnant pools.
This was overruled by a court judgement, which set the minimum rate of water flow through the rapids and made the maintenance of the old dams compulsory. The scene was thus set for architects and others to encourage locals to 'look up from the river to the buildings on its banks'.
Ann-Charlotte Hertz, the curator of ancient monuments at the City Museum, has been involved with every stage of the industrial landscape project for three decades. 'At first it wasn't the people of Norrköping who felt that the buildings should be saved from demolition,' she says. 'It took outsiders from Stockholm and elsewhere to see it as a valuable entity comparable to the Ruhr and similar areas in the UK.
'Initially there was unregulated demolition by the Holmen building company. But in the end it was the recession of the early 1990s which saved the area and gave us time to consider what to do. The National Heritage Board, the County Board in Linköping and the factory
owners got together to find a better way for everyone concerned.'
Eventually it became Sweden's largest urban renewal project. One of the main lessons of the whole experience, in Hertz' view, is that you can't plan everything. 'Time brings things you just can't foresee. We never thought that there would be a university here, for example. What we do need is more jobs so that students can stay here after they complete their courses.'
Awareness and appreciation of not only the industrial architecture but also the lives of ordinary people is without doubt a special feature of Swedish culture. The preservation of industrial landscapes and documentation of people's working lives owes much to pioneers like Artur Hazelius who in 1891 founded the Skansen 'folk park' in Stockholm.
Skansen remains the grandaddy of all such enterprises - combining history, nature and recreation. Sweden's unique contribution to this type of development has been noted by specialists like Peter Lewis, the former director of the Beamish open-air museum in County Durham.
Lewis has admired the impressive but unassuming way in which past and present are combined in the open-air museum at the region's capital in Linköping, only 20 minutes away.
Popular writers like Vilhelm Moberg, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinson and others helped create a powerful self-awareness amongst working people in the 1920s and 1930s. A statue of Martinson, whose novels focused on the harsh life of Norrköping's female workers, adorns the industrial landscape.
Later in the 20th century, writer Sven Linqvist launched the 'dig where you stand' history-from-below movement, an approach which influenced Eric Hofrén, who became the first director of Norrköping's Museum of Work.
Hofrén believed that the new mu-seum's 'starting point will always be today's working conditions and the question of who is in power. Our museum is not only about reaction and reconstruction, but also about action and construction', he told an international museum conference in the early 1990s. He wanted the museum to become 'a cheeky voice' that would dream about and change the future of labour.
'The idea first came up in the late 1970s,' says Anders Lindh, the director of the Museum of Work or Arbetets Museum as it is called in Swedish. It was established as a foundation in 1983 by five trade union bodies.
The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) eventually provided a splendid site in the shape of the extraordinary flat-iron or Strykjärnet former factory building that juts up from rocks in the middle of the Motala river like a floating island. Its 7,000-square-metre seven floors of space opened to the public in 1991 with free admission.
The LO continues to subsidise the museum by charging a low rent.
The Arbetets Museum is a member of Worklab, the International Association of Labour Museums to which Manchester's Museum of People's History also belongs. Swedish central government provides 60 per cent of its budget.
The remaining 40 per cent is raised from partners and external sources. Around 200,000 people visit each year, with nearly half coming from Norrköping and only 3 per cent from abroad.
'Our beginning was here,' Lindh says. 'We hope we can stay here. Our role is to initiate good ideas and help people have a sense of where they come from.'
It is unique in not having a permanent collection of objects. Its mission is 'to collect and document working life - its history, its places, the people, their memories and stories', he says. 'We ask people to send us their written memories. Then we send photographers and artists to work with them, and the results are published in books, seminars and exhibitions.
'Last month, for example, we opened a touring exhibition about what it is like to be a homosexual person in working life. We now have 50 people's stories in this project, which is in collaboration with gay people's organisations.
'We don't keep most of the original documents. Usually we send them back to their owners or to the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. Not being tied to objects gives us more freedom and flexibility.'
The museum is preparing a major exhibition, to be launched in 2007, documenting Sweden's transition from agriculture to industry, and finally, looking at today's information society.
'Society is more complex today,' says Lindh. 'Sweden has gone from a "land of industry", where optimism about progress prevailed, to a situation where people are more depressed because there is no work for many who lost their jobs at the age of 55.'
Deputy director and head of exhibitions, Mikael Parr, shares Lindh's aim of 'starting with the here and now, and why we are here'. 'We look at working conditions which are political issues,' he says. 'But we are not connected with a political party and our board of trustees never tells us what to do.
'Our aim is to raise questions about the present and the future and stimulate debate. The documenting of working conditions has been a successful formula. We run a wide range of exhibitions that are attended by 300 groups of school pupils each year. Many students contact us to present their ideas on different subjects.'
Over the last decade, many throughout the country have been inspired by the Arbetets Museum. There are now over 1,300 museums of working life in Sweden, some 1,100 of which are documented in the third edition of a guide book compiled by Jan af Geijerstam published a few months ago.
That's a lot for a country of nine million people. mj
Corinna Lotz is a freelance arts journalist
Museum of Work
Norrköping's City Museum is linked by a small bridge to the Museum of Work. When it opened in 1981 the City Museum was the first in the industrial landscape to occupy former industrial premises. In premises once used for weaving and dyeing staff demonstrate how the old looms function amid deafening noise.
A maze of buildings houses Sweden's largest exhibition of arts and crafts. Fifty different trades, including coopering, cartwrighting, blacksmithing, cobbling and tailoring, are illustrated in imaginative tableaux.
The museum boasts a collection of 400,000 vintage photographs of the town, 150,000 of which are now on a database. Its lively restaurant attracts a wide clientele.
The Holmen Paper Museum, which opened in 1996, occupies a 350-square-metre space on Laxholmen Island. It is on the same site where the first hand-made paper mill opened in 1633 by Louis de Geer, the Dutch industrialist who was King Gustav Adolf's arms supplier in the Thirty Years War.
Located as it was next to the textile mills, the paper factory had a ready supply of waste fabric. The museum is operated on a volunteer basis by a group of 25 former Holmen employees who demonstrate how paper is made.
