BOOTS FACTORY

Designed by Sir Owen Williams; completed 1938 Nottingham, England
The factories designed by the architect and engineer Sir Owen Williams for Boots
Pure Drugs Company in Nottingham are regarded as buildings of seminal importance in
the history of modern architecture in Britain.
Built between 1930 and 1938, the development consists of two large buildings
designed for the manufacture of pharmaceutical products and a collection of smaller
buildings including a fire station. All the buildings still exist, and the factories were
refurbished in 1994.
Owen Williams was born in 1890. He qualified as an engineer in 1911 and a year later
joined the Trussed Concrete and Steel Company, for which he worked as an assistant
engineer prior to establishing his own practice in 1918. Three years later, he was
appointed consulting engineer to the British Empire Exhibition, a commission that
included the design of several large exhibition buildings together with a swimming pool
and a sports stadium for 125,000 spectators at Wembley. It was a turning point in his
career. The buildings, which made extensive use of reinforced concrete, were completed
in record time, and, after the exhibition opened in 1924, Williams was knighted in
recognition of his achievements. He subsequently became a registered architect and in
1930 was appointed to design a large new manufacturing complex for a wide range of
pharmaceutical products for Boots of Nottingham.
Although Boots had originally been founded by Jesse Boots, a local chemist, it was
under American ownership at the time of Williams’s appointment. The United Drugs
Company purchased a 300-acre site at Beeston on the outskirts of Nottingham in 1926,
and their initial design brief required that the complex be contained within one huge
envelope. Williams worked with the client to develop their requirements, and his first
plans were for a single building planned for phased development and designed to
accommodate wet and dry processes of manufacture located to either side of a central
shipping dock.
The first building to be constructed, the Packed Wet Goods Factory, was completed in
1932. Planned as half of the original scheme, the vast concrete, steel, and glass complex
has a footprint of 240,000 square feet. It is organized in five interrelated zones with an
unloading dock to the south, a ground floor manufacturing area with upper floors for
storage of raw materials, a main packaging hall connected to a four-story packed goods
store, and a shipping dock to the north. Administrative offices were integrated into the
scheme in a four-story block along the western edge of the complex, which was also
planned to accommodate the main entrance, laboratories, and a staff canteen.
The organization of the building is dominated by an uncompromising functionalist
approach and an interest in developing an overall systematic method of construction. The
structure consists of reinforced-concrete flat slabs spanning in two directions and
supported on square reinforced-concrete columns with flared capitals. The slabs are
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 286
cantilevered at the perimeter and around light wells, and the building is clad with a
glazed-curtain wall.
Like the early buildings designed by Albert Kahn for Henry Ford, the scheme for this
first building was planned to feed raw materials down from the upper levels. Also like
Kahn, Williams was keen to design a building that provided good working conditions,
and this is perhaps most obvious in the use of natural daylight. In addition to an extensive
glazed perimeter, the light wells bring daylight into the heart of the building. In the fivestory
packing hall, perhaps the most dramatic space in the scheme, Williams created a
roofing system with 8 1/2-inch-diameter circular glass disks within a 1 3/4-inch-deep
reinforced-concrete slab supported on steel trusses at 30-foot, 8-inch centers. He also
used a similar system over the unloading docks and the manufacturing areas.
In 1935, after Boots Company had been bought back into British ownership, Williams
was commissioned to design additional manufacturing space at Beeston. The “Drys,”
originally conceived as a mirror-image extension to his first building, was eventually
redesigned to be independent and freestanding.
Planned for the manufacture, storage, and dispatch of powders, tablets, and other dry
products, the design of this building is simpler than the earlier factory. It consists of three
zones planned for incoming raw materials, manufacture, and packaging and shipping. A
five-story central spine houses manufacturing processes that are top fed as in the “Wets”
Building. However, the atria were omitted. Single-story spaces at either side provide for
incoming raw materials to the south and for outgoing finished materials to the north.
Although built in reinforced concrete, the structural system is also different. Flat-slab
construction, limited to the central spine building, is carefully integrated with the
structure of the roofs over the single-story bays at either side. Nine-foot-deep Z section
beams of reinforced concrete span 92 feet to the north and 215 feet to the south with
extraordinary cantilevers of 30 feet and 48 feet, respectively, providing column-free
unloading and loading docks. At the point where these beams meet the multistory spine,
they are suspended from concrete hangers that are exposed on the elevation and that in
turn are suspended from deep beams at roof level. Williams, who also sought to integrate
structural and servicing systems, designed these hangers to be hollow, and they house airextract
ducts.
Perhaps it is not surprising that these buildings appear to be inspired by American
practice, for the first was commissioned by an American client; designed to optimize
materials and structural systems developed by engineers such as Ernest Ransome, Turner,
and the Trussed Steel Concrete Company; and constructed after a series of large
reinforced-concrete industrial buildings designed by Albert Kahn that had been widely
publicized. However, they should also be considered in a lineage that includes the
significant work of Maillart, Freysinnet, and Perret in Europe. Williams’s buildings for
Boots, which explore the potential of structure, rational systems, and materials at a grand
scale, have been fittingly described as Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of the 20th century.