Factory Laneway

The laneway is unremarkable in the way that working passages between factory buildings always are: gravel underfoot, debris accumulating in the margins, steel pipe gantries overhead connecting one structure to the next. A yellow caged ladder fixes to the brickwork of the warehouse wall. These were not designed spaces. They were the gaps between things that mattered. On one side stands a two-storey clad building, its blue-framed windows intact. On the other, a brick warehouse rises to a tall chimney. Both structures are part of the former Davies Coop / Bradmill textile complex on Francis Street, Yarraville, in the West Footscray industrial precinct west of Melbourne. The site's history begins not with Bradmill but with Davies Coop & Co. Ltd, a cotton spinner, weaver, dyer and finisher that in 1952 entered an agreement with the Bradford Dyers' Association Ltd of England, taking exclusive Australian rights to the "Rigmel" shrink-control process. The company formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run dyeing and finishing on property already acquired at West Footscray. By 1954 the new dye house, begun two years earlier, was nearing completion, and the company had purchased 40 acres at the site. The manufacturing buildings visible across the complex date from the early 1950s, reflecting a transitional moment in factory design: the south-lit sawtooth roof form, carried on trussed roofs rather than the close column spacing of earlier plants. The site later operated under the Bradmill name as a denim and workwear fabric manufacturer. Operations ceased around 2001 as tariff protection wound back and import competition intensified. By 2011, when this photograph was made, the complex had been empty for several years. The laneway, the gantries, the ladder, the blue-framed windows: all of it waiting in the particular stillness of a site that has stopped but not yet been cleared.