03.04.18

Along the No. 20 Line: "This is the stop for Rogers' Sugar Refinery, the biggest factory in the East End (apart form the now closed shipyards). Its smokestack soars high above the waterfront. The plant stretches unbroken for the better part of two blocks, six storeys of dirty yellow brick, latticed with rows of grimed over windows, Originally built in 1898, it remains relatively unchanged fifty years later., a forbidding archetype of the turn-of-of-the-century factory." (p.24)

"The exterior suggests the conditions within. Men and some women work in dusty twilight or under arc lamps. Not much is mechanized and the hundreds of tons of sugar processed each shift are bagged, moved and manhandled with had carts and gravity chutes. Each worker performs a few simple tasks, endlessly repeate, day in and day out. You punch in, you punch out, your movement is geared to the flow of some line or the ringing of bells signalling a ten-minute break...'Glad to have a job,' some of them say." (p.24) (image: CVA)