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Porin Puuvilla – yesterday and today
According to oral tradition, the words announcing the birth of the Pori Cotton Mill were spoken on a train travelling between Tampere and Pori one day in late winter in 1898. The respected Pori merchant Gustaf Efraim Ramberg was sitting in the train and feeling very frustrated because Finlayson had not been able to supply him with as much cotton cloth as he needed. According to the report of his fellow, he had muttered to himself: “I’ll set up my own mill.”
And in fact the mill was established that very year by Ramberg and his business associates and has formed an inseparable part of the daily lives of thousands of people in Pori ever since. Porin Puuvilla was by far the largest employer in the town, employing women in particular, and provided a livelihood for nearly 3000 of the city’s inhabitants for almost a hundred years.
Today well over twice that many people study or work in the Puuvilla area or visit it on business. The buildings in the area house a major educational, office and leisure complex, and the Pori University Consortium, the newspaper Satakunnan Kansa and the Pori Jazz festival are some of the organizations that function there. The area contains keep fit centres, restaurants, a media house, health centre, dancing school, coffee roasting plant and artisan studios. It has been said that nowadays it is possible to imagine almost anything in the premises, except a cotton mill.
A project survey for building the new Puuvilla retail and business complex got underway at the beginning of September 2009. Although the renaissance of old industrial milieus has been fashionable elsewhere in Europe for many years, in Finland Porin Puuvilla is the first site to take maximum advantage of the potential offered by nineteenth century classical industrial architecture. The idea behind the Puuvilla cultural inheritance process is to build a history of the mill so as to find the key to the past of the city, its culture and the surroundings; it should also help raise the value of the historical buildings.
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