ABSTRACT
The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) had included some industrial buildings such as malthouses and watermills in its county inventories, but was then working to a cut-off date of 1700. In Scotland, on the other hand, nineteenth-century industrial buildings had been included in the county inventories prepared in the 1950s by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) at the instigation of the then secretary to the commission, Angus Graham. This emphasis on compiling lists of industrial sites was also reflected in the earlier publications on industrial archaeology, many of which took the form of regional gazetteers, but little attempt was made to prioritise these sites on a national basis. From the late 1960s, however, a number of industrial monuments were added to the schedules, largely as a result of recommendations from the CBA’s Advisory Panel which considered lists of sites prepared by the Survey Officer and others on either a thematic or a regional basis. The scope of the thematic surveys depended on the interests of the volunteers prepared to undertake them, and included lighthouses, water-raising by animal power and existing steam plant in water supply, sewage and drainage pumping stations. While creating a valuable record, the scope of these thematic surveys was obviously highly selective and did not enable the majority of sites to be placed in their context. The Industrial Monuments Survey, then the responsibility of Keith Falconer, followed the NRIM to the University of Bath in 1977 and both were transferred to RCHME in 1981. From a national point of view, then, the CBA was the first archaeological organisation to espouse this new aspect of archaeology but did not altogether maintain its interest, whereas the Royal Commissions were slightly later in the field but have been responsible for maintaining and developing the records created in those early years.
