Home from work: the company town housing model | Housing network | Guardian Professional

Home from work: the company town housing model | Housing network | Guardian Professional

My maternal grandfather was an engineer, the type of industrious, practical-minded man that Britain used to produce with ease during an era of imperial pomp. Had he been born a few decades earlier, he might have found himself working in some distant outpost of the empire. But my grandfather never worked overseas, with the exception of the odd business trip.


For most of his life he worked for Bata in East Tilbury, Essex, the self-styled "shoemakers to the world". Yet in many ways the Bata site, built on the soft banks of the Thames estuary, was as foreign to the average English person as one of Britain's former colonies.