Cantines d’entreprise et discours hygiénistes dans l’industrie britannique de l’entre-deux-guerres

The widespread adoption of canteens within British factories was a product of government intervention during the First World War, reflecting the State’s distinctive wartime objectives. However, this article has sought to dispel the notion that employers discarded such canteens following the cessation of hostilities, while acknowledging the distinctive function of industrial welfare architecture such as canteens in the interwar period. The ideal of industrial health which crystallised over the course of World War I, and which the factory canteen reflected, helps explain why canteens were the lynchpin of interwar industrial welfare scheme implemented by employers. Canteens embodied a holistic, generalised concept of industrial health which emphasised workers’ responsibilities for securing their own health through diet, hygiene and exercise. They marginalised employers’ responsibilities for their employees’ health, and concealed the specific health hazards of the industrial workplace, thus serving effectively as a means of stalling legislative intervention on health and safety issues.