What the Victorians did for Droyt’s.
Sometimes when I’m on the train and we pass a nice shiny new industrial estate with nice shiny new metal sheds, I mean, commercial premises, I think ‘wouldn’t it be nice?………’. Droyt’s lives in a converted yarn mill, built in eighteen ninety something and the climate is more continental than maritime, hot in summer and cold in winter. The walls are solid brick and take a long time to heat up, so first thing Monday morning in winter is pretty chilly in the office. The floors are half stone flags and half concrete in the downstairs bit and wooden floorboards upstairs in the packing department. None of the windows is double glazed and the roof is not insulated. So all very inefficient in terms of energy use and in terms of production there isn’t a smooth product flow from one process to the next (in between production and packing, the soap has to be lifted up one floor!)
And I’m particularly thinking this at the moment because over the w/e we had LOADS of rain and now we’ve got a leak in the boiler house. I happen to be quite handy and after having a quick look at the problem I can see that the lead flashing does not exist for a 2 metre section. How did that happen? It looks like it’s been mortared in, so I’m guessing that this was a quick repair done more than 15 years ago, which has lasted until now. Anyway, it only leaks when it’s really heavy rain, so I’ll put it down on the list and maybe I’ll get around to it one day soon. Which reminds me, I’ll also have to get up on a ladder to look at the gutter over the street. Oh, it’s all fun and games.
So back to my dreams of working in a dry, warm, efficient, soulless, uninteresting shed. I suppose it might happen one day, if we could ever afford it, but there’s no doubt that the company would lose something along the way.