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Baťa builds a company town
Baťa factory complex · Zlín, Czech Republic · 1930-01-01
Between the wars the Baťa shoe company rebuilt Zlín as a functionalist company town: standardised red-brick factory blocks on a repeating grid, workers' housing, schools, a hospital, a department store and a skyscraper headquarters famous for the director's office built inside a lift. Building No. 21 still anchors the city. Zlín exported the model worldwide — Bataville in France, Batanagar in India — one of the most complete company towns anywhere.
The record
| Date | 1930-01-01 |
|---|---|
| Place | Baťa factory complex, Zlín, Czech Republic |
| Coordinates | 49.226, 17.666 (city-level precision) |
| Scope | Local interest |
| Sources | Wikipedia |
| Added | 2026-08-14 · source: editors |
Coordinates are given at city level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.
Finding photographs
Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.
- Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
- The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
- Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
- National and municipal archives of Czech Republic, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.
Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.
Footage
Newsreel and archive film of events like this often survives. Search YouTube for this event If you find good footage, send us the link and we will attach it to this page.
Time layers at this place
One place, several moments in time. This location has 9 recorded time layers between 1930 and 1995 — slide through them:
- 1930 — Baťa builds a company town this page
- 1936 — Svobodárny (Díly)
- 1937 — Evangelický kostel (Zlín)
- 1937 — Střední průmyslová škola kožařská
- 1947 — Věžové domy (Zlín)
- 1949 — Centrální sklad obuvi (Zlín)
- 1960 — Městské divadlo (Zlín)
- 1961 — Zlínský chodník slávy
- 1995 — Fakulta managementu a ekonomiky Univerzity Tomáše Bati ve Zlíně
Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.
You can add to this page
This entry is a skeleton on purpose. If you were there, if your family was, or if you simply know the place: photographs (yours or ones you have the right to share), comments and corrections to the record above, and observations — what the place was like before, after, what the books get wrong. Everything is read by a person before publication and credited the way you ask.
What readers have added
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Old photographs, what your family remembers being on the corner, a shop that is not on any map we have. Contributions are read by a person before anything is published, and we never publish the names of living people.
Nearby in Europe
- Městské divadlo (Zlín) (1960)Zlín
- Zlínský chodník slávy (1961)Zlín
- Střední průmyslová škola kožařská (1937)Zlín
- Centrální sklad obuvi (Zlín) (1949)Zlín
- Evangelický kostel (Zlín) (1937)Zlín
- Fakulta managementu a ekonomiky Univerzity Tomáše Bati ve Zlíně (1995)Zlín