‘Hoover Factory’: Elvis Costello’s ode to a lesser-known London landmark
Any Brit will know that the word “hoover” is a genericised trademark in the UK; a catch-all term for any type or brand of vacuum cleaner, and even the act of vacuuming itself, which is almost exclusively referred to as “hoovering”.
You might presume that this same linguistic phenomenon would exist in America, where the Hoover Company was founded and is still headquartered today, but oddly enough, it doesn’t. The explanation might boil down to a matter of timing, and to the construction of one specific building in the London Borough of Ealing way back in 1932.
“Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue,” Elvis Costello sang on one of his early B-side recordings, “Must have been a wonder when it was brand new / Talkin’ ’bout the splendour of the Hoover factory / I know that you’d agree if you had seen it too.”
The offbeat song, clocking in at one minute and 43 seconds and titled simply ‘Hoover Factory’, was written before the release of Costello’s 1977 debut album My Aim is True, and was inspired by his daily, pre-fame commute to work.
Costello, when he was still Declan MacManus, was a computer operator at the Elizabeth Arden perfume plant just down the road, and would travel past the eye-catching Hoover Building each day, admiring its classic Art Deco design. He would eventually mention his own office in the song ‘I’m Not Angry’ on My Aim Is True, calling it the “vanity factory”. His ode to the Hoover facility, meanwhile, reached a wider audience when it was released on the 1980 compilation album Taking Liberties.
Hoover was still manufacturing vacuums in the building when Costello was writing about it in the late 1970s, but even then, he was left to wonder about its original glory, as 40 years had taken a toll. Back in 1932, when the first, street-facing portion of the Hoover factory opened, it was a modern marvel, reviled by the old architectural guard of London, but representative of the new, streamlined style taking hold in American cities. The firm of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners built it during a time when the demand for electric vacuum cleaners was skyrocketing, giving the Ohio-based Hoover Company an inside track on establishing a major UK presence and dominating the industry. And that they did.
The Western Avenue building was expanded twice before 1940, and additional plants were opened in Scotland and Wales after the war, as Hoover soon became literally synonymous with the British concept of a vacuum cleaner.
By the late 1970s, of course, Britain’s manufacturing heyday was already in the rearview mirror, and a lot of the grand factories of the past were shutting down. Costello seemed to anticipate this, envisioning the old Hoover building becoming a part of the latest post-industrial trend; repurposed for expensive new offices or housing: “One of these days the Hoover factory / Is gonna be all the rage in those fashionable pages.”
Sure enough, after Hoover finally sold off the building in the mid-1980s, and Tesco made its own considerable adjustments to the complex in the 1990s, the building underwent a full redevelopment in the 2010s, preserving its Grade II listed facade, but having most of its interior space converted into swank flats; the type that would certainly be featured in the “fashionable pages,” or real estate apps, that Elvis loosely anticipated.
