New Journal Paper: Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa

Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra and Iain Jackson, “Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa”, ABE Journal [Online], 23 | 2024, Online since 01 October 2024, connection on 01 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130

In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the British architects Edric Neel (1914-1952), Raglan Squire (1912-2004), and Rodney Thomas (1902-1996) created Arcon (short for Architectural Consultants). Focused on applying factory mass production systems to the building industry, Arcon engaged in an unusual, yet close, partnership with the civil engineering contracting company Taylor Woodrow. While their first project became one of Britain’s most popular post-war “prefabs,” it is little known that in the years thereafter a similar structural steel system was widely marketed in Britain’s West African colonies, where it became one of the most frequently used prefabricated building designs. Through the support of Taylor Woodrow, which acted as the agent for Arcon’s worldwide implementation, the prefabrication system was utilized in a range of contexts: to build houses for British companies, to build schools and market halls for colonial governments, and, of most interest here, to build factories and warehouses for the United Africa Company (UAC), as part of the industrialization drive that accompanied decolonization in the 1950s. The UAC was part of Unilever, and one of the largest conglomerates of trading and manufacturing interests active across “British” West Africa. It entered a partnership with Taylor Woodrow to jointly market the Arcon system, thereby profiting from the erection of its own buildings, and the sale of the Arcon system of construction to colonial and subsequently, post-colonial governments across the region. Today, Arcon structures, often sizeable sheds clad with imported metal sheets or locally available timber, can still be found across Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.

Full open access paper available here: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130