"The Arkwright system substituted capital for labour, machines for skill, factory for home, and mill discipline for family work routines." David Jeremy 1981
The eighteenth century witnessed a fundamental restructuring of economic organisation within society, resulting in the major landmark in human history that came to be known as the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Amongst its many innovations was the successful harnessing of relatively large amounts of natural energy to deliver the mechanical power needed to drive machines housed in mills producing goods of superior quality at an unprecedented rate. The first stages in the establishment of this new system, the factory system, occurred at the southern end of the Derwent Valley, in Derby. Lombe’s Silk Mill, when it opened in 1721, brought to England technology developed in Italy which enabled silk to be thrown on machines driven by water power. This important step towards full-scale factory production did not on its own trigger rapid or widespread economic investment in mechanised production, but its influence on the later developments in the cotton industry which took place a few miles to the north, at Cromford, is now widely recognised.
It was Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill which provided the true blueprint for factory production. Arkwright’s system was copied widely in many parts of Britain and, soon after, in other countries.
The structures which housed the new industry and its workforce and the landscape created around them remain. Overall, the degree to which early mill sites in the nominated area have survived is remarkable. The value of Cromford in the nominated World Heritage Site is further enhanced by the survival of the settlement that was constructed contemporaneously with the industrial buildings to accommodate the mill workers. Cromford was relatively remote and sparsely populated, and Arkwright could only obtain the young people he required for his labour force if he provided houses for their parents. In Cromford, there emerged a new kind of industrial community which was copied and developed in the other Derwent Valley settlements.
Arkwright’s activities stimulated a surge of industrial growth in the Derwent Valley. His close association with the entrepreneurs Jedediah Strutt, Thomas Evans, and Peter Nightingale set in train a series of important developments between Cromford and Derby. All were successful industrialists, whose economic interests extended well beyond cotton manufacturing. They were also enlightened employers who displayed a strong sense of responsibility for their workforce, their dependants and for the communities that came into being to serve the new industrial system. As such, the developments at Belper, beginning in 1776-77, at Milford in 1781 and Darley Abbey from 1782, provided early models for the creation of industrial communities.
Today, the housing and infrastructure in these settlements, which were brought into being by the same economic and industrial pressures and constraints as Cromford, offer unique opportunities for comparison and analysis. In each case, there has been a high degree of survival and the number of houses of an early date, the range of the house types and the extent of the community infrastructure, are the components of an archive of bricks and mortar of unparalleled importance. Nowhere outside the Derwent Valley does the physical evidence of the early factory community survive in such abundance.
Early cotton mills were so profitable, entrepreneurs were prepared to risk prosecution for infringing Arkwright’s patents to obtain a share of the market. By the time the patents were finally set aside in 1785, a ‘gold rush’ was in progress. This continued until boom turned to bust but by 1788 over 200 Arkwright type mills had been established in Great Britain.
The dissemination of Arkwright’s factory system overseas was achieved partly by the migration of skilled workmen and sometimes by piracy. Samuel Slater, 1768-1835, who had served his apprenticeship with the Strutts in Milford, and who migrated to the United States, is the prime example. In Europe, industrial piracy played a more significant part. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Brugelmann was the pioneer. His access to the Arkwright technology was achieved through a third party who persuaded a number of Arkwright’s work people from Cromford and Nottingham to move to Ratingen.As early as 1788, according to Dr S D Chapman there were four Arkwright type mills in France and five in Germany.
The manufacture of cotton thread continued to prosper in the Derwent Valley through the nineteenth century at a level that was sufficient to maintain the mills and their communities. Some extensions to the mills were built especially after the formation of the English Sewing Cotton Company in 1897 as, for example, at Masson Mill and at Belper in the construction of the East Mill. The survival of the mills depended upon specialisation and the manufacture of sewing thread for industrial and domestic purposes rather than spinning became the main function.
As the heart of the textile industry moved to Lancashire and Cheshire, the Derwent Valley became a relative backwater. This was particularly the case at Cromford, where a combination of topographical constraints and inaccessibility limited the possibility for growth. Had the Derwent Valley rather than Manchester become Cottonopolis, there would have been a serious risk of these earlier settlements being over-run and their monuments lost, overwhelmed in the name of economic development.
As it was, though Derby itself remained a market and mill town until the second half of the 19th century when the railway industry led to a second phase of industrial expansion, further industrial growth and escalating urbanisation did not engulf the valley north of Derby. The original late 18th and early 19th century mills and the community infrastructure have survived. The cultural landscape created by the factory system remains substantially intact.
The Derwent Valley has received international recognition already. In 1994 TICCIH acted as a specialist committee on the Global Study of sites being undertaken by the World Heritage Office at ICOMOS. A list of the 24 industrial sites and landscapes considered to be of greatest international significance (and not then inscribed on the World Heritage List), was forwarded to the World Heritage Committee via ICOMOS. This included the Derwent Valley Mills.
"We all looked up to him and imitated his mode of building" Sir Robert Peel 1816
Within Great Britain the new factory system spread rapidly, and wherever it took root it was the complete Arkwright package the investors purchased. Each of the components developed in the Derwent Valley, the machinery and power transmission, the buildings, the production systems and labour management, were adopted without scrutiny. As a consequence, making comparison between the Derwent Valley settlements and other sites elsewhere is to compare siblings with the parent that gave them their being. New Lanark, a site of outstanding importance, is just such a case. It owes its existence to a visit Richard Arkwright and David Dale made to the Falls of Clyde in 1784. So impressed was Richard Arkwright with the site, he is alleged to have said “Lanark would probably become the Manchester of Scotland”. The partnership with David Dale which followed, though short-lived, led to the construction of four large mills at least two of which were equipped with the Arkwright system. The similarity between the first two New Lanark mills with their projecting stair bays and Palladian windows and the earlier Masson Mill is striking.
Dale’s factory settlement on the other hand owed less to its Derwent Valley forerunners and this is partly the result of a difference in the composition of the labour force Dale employed and partly the influence of a Scottish housing tradition. Unlike Arkwright, Dale employed pauper children who, by 1799, numbered nearly 500. Many of them were housed in a mill building which also served as a warehouse and workshop before specialised buildings were built to free the mill for production. Dale also built a number of tenement blocks to house the families among his workforce. Clearly the multi-storey tenement block has its origins in Scottish social and architectural tradition and does not derive from the Derwent Valley model.
The heroic phase of New Lanark’s development, in the hands of Robert Owen, 1771-1858, the pioneer of enlightened mill management and factory reform, did not begin until 1799, when a partnership led by Owen acquired the mill. It was he who added the ‘New Institution’ for the gainful education of young and old.
New Lanark is now seen universally as a monument to Robert Owen’s enlightened and radical experiments in education, factory management and social control. It is a fitting memorial and one which is not diminished by the recollection that the mill structures which survive and provide the settlement’s raison d’être, derive from Arkwright’s visit to the Falls of Clyde and from his own experiments in the Derwent Valley.
Stanley Mill on the River Tay, near Perth, had a similar inception. Here Arkwright’s principal partner was George Dempster. Again, the partnership was short-lived, Arkwright apparently withdrawing soon after training the nucleus of the Stanley mill workforce at Cromford. Nonetheless, the mill which was erected at Stanley was a typical first generation Arkwright mill with an accompanying factory village. The Bell Mill, unusually for Scotland of brick above a stone base, was complete by 1790 but it was not until c.1840 that the present configuration of the site began to take shape. In its final form the complex extended around three sides of an irregular courtyard, and in its newly restored state it is among the largest of the preserved mill sites in the United Kingdom. New Lanark has, and the Stanley Mill complex will have in the future, provision for public access and facilities for education and historical interpretation.
In England, the outstanding early cotton mill site outside the Derwent Valley is the Greg’s Mill at Styal. Once again the extent to which it is derived from the Cromford model is readily apparent. It was built in 1784 to house Arkwright water frames initially on a small scale. The first structure measured 8.5 m x 27.5 m and was extended in 1796. The water power was upgraded in 1801 with the result that by 1805 the capacity of what had begun as a small rural mill had grown to 3,452 spindles. Like David Dale, Samuel Greg relied heavily on pauper labour and his apprentice house accommodated as many as 100 children. In due course housing was provided some distance from the mill which by 1820 included a school and a chapel. As in the Derwent Valley communities, rent for the housing was deducted from mill wages.
Eighty years later, many of the elements of mass production pioneered in the Derwent Valley Mills were to be combined to great effect at Saltaire in Yorkshire, the most complete model village to be built for the textile industry in Britain. It expresses the culmination of the process, first started in the Derwent Valley and later developed further at New Lanark, of providing housing and social facilities for workers, which was planned from the outset and dignified by an overall architectural style. The mill was opened by Titus Salt in 1853 and was the epitome of architectural advance. It has survived better than any of its peers. Saltaire captured the imagination of all who were associated with its construction. William Fairbairn, who was responsible for much of the engineering in the mill, wrote
“more than 3000 persons are employed in these works, and immediately surrounding this palace of industry is a new town containing double that number of inhabitants, with all the conveniences of churches, chapels, schools, mechanics institute, baths and wash house, all of which have been established by the same spirited proprietor”.
The Mayor of Bradford, who spoke at the opening of Saltaire Mill in 1853, also had palaces on his mind. For him, the Salts had built “palaces of industry almost equal to the palaces of the Caesars!”.
The international perspective, no less than the national context, reveals a relationship between the Arkwright system as it had developed in the Derwent Valley and the systems planted in Europe and North America which is entirely derivative. Following the Act of 1774 which prohibited the export of the ‘tools or utensils’ of the cotton and linen industries, the legal barrier against the export of machinery was absolute. Only by subterfuge could the transfer of technology take place. Despite the legal barriers in the summer of 1784, Johann Gottfried Brügelmann’s mill at Ratingen (near Dusseldorf) began production and, as soon as he had secured the protection of a 12 year monopoly, he named his mill settlement Cromford. This was no defiant gesture. There were good commercial reasons behind the adoption of a name which more than any other would secure a market for his products. Brugelmann’s acquisition of the Arkwright system was the work of a close friend, Carl Albrecht Delius, a German who had spent many years in England.
Cromford Ratingen’s claim to be the first Arkwright mill in continental Europe remains unchallenged though there were Arkwright frames in use in France 12 months later. These were in Louviers and soon after at Valencay and elsewhere. In France, as in Germany, a number of English expatriates were at work, notably the Milne family of Stockport and two men known variously as Theakston and Flint, and Wood and Hill who had learned their business working for the Peels in Bury, though they also claimed to have been managers in Cromford. There were two particular difficulties for the French in adopting the Arkwright system. Firstly, they underestimated the management and production skills believing, until they learnt by experience, that if they secured the machines they had unlocked the secret of the system. They also lacked the skills to build the machinery, and there was a shortage of good quality castings for the gearing and moving parts, with the result in one case that workmen had to be brought in from England to complete the work.
In Czechoslovakia, the Bohemian linen and woollen trade was highly developed and extended across Europe. The cotton industry, though less extensive, was, as in other countries, the first to adopt mechanised production. It is claimed that factory spinning reached Bohemia as early as 1780, but more substantial evidence exists for the investments made by Johann Josef Leitenburger in 1796 who employed Rigo, a Danish engineer from Copenhagen, to build English spinning machines though it is not entirely clear that it was Arkwright machinery being installed.
In North America, the need for Arkwright technology was acute. By 1790, Britain possessed 2.41 million machine spindles, and the United States had less than 2000 jenny spindles and no water frames but it was not until skilled migrants, notably Samuel Slater and Thomas Marshall, both from the Derwent Valley, offered their services that the Arkwright system began to take root. Samuel Slater was one of the few who succeeded. It was his achievement to be the first in America to achieve profitability with Arkwright technology.
In the dissemination of the Arkwright factory system, nationally and internationally, a characteristic pattern emerges. The machinery and the management systems were adopted slavishly with little or no alteration. Within Great Britain, the building forms are recognisable as units within the same design system - some larger some smaller - but all part of the Arkwright family. The picture of uniformity which emerges is the product of two elements - the customer’s desire to invest in a system that is known to work and the key role played by a small cadre of experts who understood the new technology. These were men like Thomas Lowe of Nottingham, Arkwright’s millwright and engineer and overseers or managers from the early mills who sold their expertise to would-be factory masters. In the export of the system abroad, the local building tradition often replaced the Derwent Valley pattern as in the New England mills, or the result could be an amalgam of Arkwright form and local style as occurred in Cromford Ratingen.
The factory housing which accompanied these mill developments did not follow a common form. This could be said to be similar to the Derwent Valley settlements which are themselves comprised of a variety of house types and have no standardised layout. There is, however, one element of the Derwent Valley’s housing stock, the Cluster house, which was exported. It evolved in Darley Abbey and Belper but it is in Belper that the term ‘Cluster’ is first used. The Cluster house has been identified in Cité Ouvrière at Mulhouse, in Bolsterbaum in the Ruhrgebiet, and in Spain.
The fire-proof structures in the Derwent Valley, now principally represented at Belper in the North Mill, and to a lesser extent at Darley Abbey, are important elements in the development of fire-proofing techniques. The typology started in Derby from 1792-93, and in the West Mill, Belper from 1793-95, and was taken to a higher degree of development in 1804 in the North Mill, Belper. The oldest surviving fire-proof mill using cast iron structural members is the Ditherington Flax Mill at Shrewsbury designed by Charles Bage, which was built in 1796-97. Bage improved Strutt’s earlier system incorporating the use of cast iron beams and went on to build a further mill in Leeds, before William Strutt turned his attention to the North Mill. Bage’s work in Leeds and Boulton and Watt’s in Salford have not survived and Belper North Mill stands as the second oldest structure of its kind. The cast iron elements of the Darley Abbey Mills are believed to date from c.1820 and await further detailed investigation. They are of particular interest. In view of the close association William Strutt had with the Evans family, there is the possibility that this was also his work.
Among the industrial sites on the World Heritage List only Crespi d’Adda, in Italy, which was inscribed in 1995, shares a common history with the Derwent Valley nominated site in that it is a product of the cotton industry. It is however a late 19th century development adjacent to a cotton mill which was built in 1878. It is an outstanding example of a 19th century company town, part of the tradition which could be said to claim amongst its antecedents Saltaire and the Derwent Valley factory settlements.
