Spirella Building
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The name Spirella refers to the Spirella Stay which was invented by Marcus Merritt Beeman in the US in 1904 and made from tightly twisted and flattened coils of wire. The founders were Beeman, William Wallace Kincaid and Jesse Homan Pardee.


Origins

The Spirella name was used by the Spirella Corset Company Inc that was founded in 1904 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, USA. It was founded on a patent of dressbone, for bustles, but started corset manufacture in 1904. The company manufactured made-to-measure corsets. Benefits for the company's employees included travel, education and health care.


United Kingdom

The UK subsidiary was The Spirella Company of Great Britain. Spirella co-founder and entrepreneur William Wallace Kincaid commissioned the architect Cecil Hignett to design a state-of-the art factory of architectural beauty. The design included embellishments in Arts & Crafts styling. This factory, the Spirella Building, was built and expanded in stages between 1912 and 1920. During World War II, the Irvin Airchute Company expanded its production of parachutes into the Spirella Building and women working for the British Tabulating Machine Company secretly produced components for the decoding machines called
Bombe The bombe () was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functi ...
s. The company's most popular corset was the Model 305. Spirella products were not sold in shops. Instead, female staff called corsetiers (or corsetières) were sent to customers' homes. After an ill-fated attempt to market garments of "Stub-tex", a form of
Gore-Tex Gore-Tex is a waterproof, breathable fabric membrane and registered trademark of W. L. Gore & Associates. Invented in 1969, Gore-Tex can repel liquid water while allowing water vapor to pass through and is designed to be a lightweight, waterpr ...
being used under licence from W. L. Gore & Associates, the company was sold in 1985 to the rival Spencers of Banbury and finally closed in July 1989. The Spirella Building was designed to provide workers with a highly productive and pleasant environment that focused on the comfort of factory employees. Referred to as the "factory of beauty", it offered a wide array of employee amenities including "baths, showers, gymnastics classes, a library, free eye tests and bicycle repairs". In 1979 it was Grade II*
listed Listed may refer to: * Listed, Bornholm, a fishing village on the Danish island of Bornholm * Listed (MMM program), a television show on MuchMoreMusic * Endangered species in biology * Listed building, in architecture, designation of a historicall ...
. The Letchworth Garden City Foundation bought the neglected building in 1995, restored the interior and re-opened it for leased office accommodation. It currently houses over twenty businesses.


Locations

At its height the company had factories in the USA ( Meadville, Pennsylvania,
New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...
, and Lincoln Nebraska ), in Canada (in 1910), in the UK (in 1910; from 1912 in the Spirella Building in
Letchworth Letchworth Garden City, commonly known as Letchworth, is a town in the North Hertfordshire district of Hertfordshire, England. It is noted for being the first garden city. The population at the time of the 2011 census was 33,249. Letchworth ...
) and in Sweden (
Malmö Malmö (, ; da, Malmø ) is the largest city in the Swedish county (län) of Scania (Skåne). It is the third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the sixth-largest city in the Nordic region, with a municipal populat ...
) in 1920 and Niagara Falls NY (in 1917). Their flagship location was ''Spirella House'' on
Oxford Circus Oxford Circus is a road junction connecting Oxford Street and Regent Street in the West End of London. It is also the entrance to Oxford Circus tube station. The junction opened in 1819 as part of the Regent Street development under John Nash, ...
, London. A factory built in 1910 in Niagara falls, Ontario, eventually became the premises of the Bird Kingdom Tropical Adventure.


Archival Collections

A number of organisations have collected archival examples of documents and objects related to the Spirella Factory. The Garden City Collection in Letchworth includes over forty objects and documents in its collection. Additionally, collections are maintained by Hertfordshire's Community Archives Network. Archival examples include: the Castle Corset cartoon and an advertisement for the Spirella War Savings Association.


References


External links


Photograph of Spirella workers in Meadville, Pennsylvania

The Ballroom of Spirella's factory in Letchworth, England



The Textile Society's Report of an exhibition in 2013 on 'Spirella Company - Corset Makers & Corsetieres'


The Spirella_Manual (1913)
The Garden City Collection, Spirella theme of images

Historical photos of the Lincoln Nebraska location
Nebraska Memories

{{Authority control Corsetry Buildings and structures in Letchworth