The lovely suburban town of Hayes is perfectly evocative of the brilliance of the city design of London and its outlying regions throughout the centuries. Rare is the city that can grow as exponentially as the massive home of Big Ben yet can still manage to work without breaking down during times of extreme growth. At any rate, one can't be chided too much for assuming that Hayes is simply a suburb of London and all of the town's charm and grace comes from its proximity to the enormous behemoth of a city. This, however, would be a very cruel and inaccurate assumption because, while Hayes is often grouped in with the other outlying towns of London, the truth of the matter is that the town is perhaps the best example of the history of suburban development as well as a living, breathing history book that teaches us how the Industrial Revolution forever changed our planet.
Hayes as we know it was created because of the growth of London and ever since its inception it has been indelibly linked to industry. It was one of the first towns that was created simply as a place that housed buildings dedicated to creating the tools of industry that have rocketed our civilization toward ever increasing technology and this has been its sole purpose. Many people know of the Industrial Revolution but few know that there was in fact a smaller Second Industrial Revolution that occurred in the late 1800s. It was during this time that entire cities were constructed with the sole intent of creating jobs and materials and this era was perhaps more influential in terms of the growth of the cultures that benefited the most from the two revolutions. It was in this era that "light" industrial growth occurred and Hayes is therefore the perfect time capsule for this trend.
During the early part of the 1800s Hayes was mostly the home of brickmaking and agricultural industries. While certain locations around the world (including London) were growing as a result of factories and railways, Hayes was still something of a simple town until the growth of London made it necessary for its neighbours to explode in growth. Within no time Hayes began to experience an influx of residents for two reasons: The first is that London quickly became crowded and towns that had little relation to the big city soon found themselves enveloped as part of the metropolis. The other facet that led to the growth of Hayes was the fact that companies like the Gramophone Company, which would later take on the more familiar name of EMI, began to set up shop in the town. These days Hayes is still a home of light industry and it had or still has countless big names operating within including Heinz, Nestle, and EMV. Hayes may be officially a suburb of London but the fact of the matter is that there is perhaps no suburb as fascinating or as influential as the lovely town of Hayes.
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