Spinning the Web > Industry > The Factory

From the opening of Arkwright's mill at Cromford in 1771, cotton mills (or "manufactories") grew in size and number, becoming ever larger and noisier in the process. The single hand-mule kept in the attic of the manufacturer's home became inadequate to produce the amounts of yarn needed to feed even larger handlooms (made more efficient by Kay's "Flying Shuttle") and later, power looms. On average, it took six spinners to keep one weaver supplied with the yarn he needed to weave cloth. Neighbouring domestic cotton producers began to co-operate, sharing their attics and creating large single rooms which had enough room to house larger textile machines such as Hargreaves' "spinning jenny" and Crompton's "Mule": it is likely that many successful cotton business partnerships started in this way. Improvements in the Spinning Mule led to larger and longer machines, and soon even these early "attic factories" were no longer big enough to house the new cotton machines.

The early cotton factories, such as Richard Arkwright's cotton mill at Cromford (1771) relied on water power to drive machinery, therefore requiring a river to drive a waterwheel which provided the required power (Arkwright's "water frame" spinning machinery was too big to be driven by hand). A typical factory of the 18th Century was generally smaller than those that were to follow in the 19th and 20th centuries, usually with three or four floors and around 100ft long, made of stone or brick with a timbered roof and large, closely-spaced windows to allow in as much light as possible (there were larger mills, such as the Murray mills in Ancoats, built in the 1790s, but these were the exception rather than the rule.)

Larger mills several hundred feet long and six or seven storeys in height were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In mills where combined production (preparation, spinning and weaving) took place, the upper floor would be reserved for weaving, lit by numerous skylights in order to allow the weaver the light needed to inspect the quality of cloth coming off the loom. Although the size of cotton mills grew throughout the 19th Century, there was no real alteration in their design between 1840 and 1900, when the most popular type of Lancashire factory was constructed around the principle of cast iron columns and brick arches.

'...everything in the factory...happens with admirable precision and neatness and at the same time with great speed...it seemed...as if all these wheels were...really alive and the people occupied with them were machines...'
(Schopenhauer, Johanna. Sammtliche Schriften. Frankfurt, 1830)

A new millscape was born in the 19th Century: Lancashire towns and cities became dominated by the chimneys that disbursed the smoke steam-driven engines generated. With the decline of the cotton industry in the second half of the 20th Century, new uses have been found for the dark satanic mills, and the architecture that made the cotton industry great remains part of our modern urban landscape.

NR

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