Belper is located half way between Cromford and
Derby. The river Derwent
and the A6 trunk road, a former turnpike, run
along the western edge of the
town. The Strutts’ mill complex and the greater
part of the associated
housing is all to the north of the town centre,
with the houses stretching out
in rows and terraces up the slopes of the hills
to the north and the east.
Jedediah Strutt and after him, his sons, William,
George Benson and Joseph,
developed the mills over a period of about 40 years
between 1777 and 1815.
Thanks to William Strutt’s innovatory talents
as an engineer the site included
a range of structures. Taken together, they charted
the evolution of mill
design from the traditional stone and timber structures
through to the first
steps in fire protection and onto the full use
of iron and brick-arched fire-proofing.
Few of these buildings survived the clearance of
the site c.1960.
The Strutt factory communities in Belper and Milford have survived almost without loss. The houses, the farms and public buildings, together with the documentary material which has been collected, represent a unique archive for the industrial and social historian. The survival of the Strutt housing has been underpinned by the quality of the buildings the Strutts commissioned. If the houses had been built to a low specification they would have been superseded a century ago, victims of the legislation to improve basic housing standards and of public demand for better quality housing. As it was, the Strutts retained their inheritance, repairing and improving their housing stock from time to time until the 1950s when the family began to dispose of its property and the houses gradually became owner occupied.
Belper North Mill, rebuilt in 1804 by William Strutt
on the
lower storeys of the earlier mill that had been
destroyed by
fire in 1803, embodies the knowledge accumulated
from all
the earlier experiments William Strutt had made
into fire-resistant
mill structures and from his close participation
in
Charles Bage’s pioneering work at Shrewsbury.
William
Strutt, 1756-1830, was a mechanic and engineer
of the
highest distinction. He was the first to tackle
systematically
the threat of fire in textile mills first by cladding
with
plaster and then by the use of iron and brick.
His work with Charles Bage, who grew up in Darley
Abbey and who he may have known from an early
age, was seminal in the evolution of fire-proof design.
It was Charles Bage who produced the first iron-framed
mill at Shrewsbury in 1796 and
then went on to build a further mill in Leeds.
William Strutt’s Belper Mill embodied much
of what Charles Bage had learnt and took further
the evolution of these structures from
which there emerged, two generations later, the first
fully framed building, the Sheerness
Boat Store.
The mill is constructed in brick on a stone plinth. The exterior retains the character of the earlier mill and so has the appearance of a first generation Arkwright-type structure. Every aspect of the building was designed to resist combustion. It has a T-shaped plan consisting of a main range of 17 bays and a wing of 6 bays. Housed within the wing is the wheel chamber that occupies the three bays adjacent to the main range.
The wheel pit, which now stands empty, gives
some indication of the power once generated
to operate this mill. The wheel installed in 1804
was replaced in 1823 at a cost of £1,383;
it was constantly repaired as daily use took its
toll. In the basement, the former ground
floor of the earlier mill, stone piers carry the
cast iron columns which support each of the
floors above. The massive stone buttresses which
were once a feature of this space have
been removed.
The floors are composed of brick and tile supported by arches that spring from cast iron beams. The beams are supported by cast iron columns which, in turn, are linked together by wrought iron ties. Clay pots are used to infill the floor arches in the bays above the water wheel so reducing the weight in this area.
Carl Friedrick Schinkel, arguably the greatest German architect of the 19th century and a member of the Prussian Public Works Committee, visited England in 1826. Schinkel described the Strutt works in Belper as “the best in England”. The sheer scale of iron-framed industrial buildings throughout the country impressed him and influenced many of his later designs, notably the Bauakademie, 1831-5 in Berlin. The mill has also attracted more recent attention. Sir Neil Cossons in 1981 described it as “the most beautiful, sophisticated and technically perfect structure of its era”.
William Strutt was recognised by his contemporaries as the leading exponent of hot-air heating systems for large buildings and the stove, which was once located in the windowless masonry block occupying the two northern bays of the western end of the North Mill, is of some interest, though it is now recognised that mill buildings of an earlier generation, as for example those at Cromford, had hot-air heating systems before William Strutt’s experiments began. The archaeology of the stove-housing and stoking area in the North Mill have been disturbed in modern times, which complicates the historic evaluation of this area of the structure. A stove which was part of a William Strutt heating system has survived and is now in the National Museum of Science and Industry in London.
The East Mill completely overshadows the North
Mill. A
fortress-like, seven-storey building with four
corner turrets, Italianate tower and rows of windows,
it was constructed by the English Sewing Cotton
Company in 1912 in the distinctive
Accrington red-brick, which had by this time become
the preferred building material for textile mills
- whether built in
Lancashire or elsewhere. It is built around a steel
frame, which by 1912 had long been entirely free-standing;
unlike
William Strutt’s structures, which relied on
the walls of the building to support them. Nevertheless,
its debt to the earlier
innovations of Strutt and Bage is palpable.
A
sandstone bridge linking the two separate areas of the
former Strutt Mills complex on either side of
the Ashbourne
Road. The archway also served a defensive role. Along its
length are gun embrasures which protected the
West Mill
counting house.
The two first mills in Belper, the South Mill
and the North
Mill, were served by the water retained by Jedediah
Strutt’s
first weir, a simple structure which spanned the
river near
the present day railway bridge.
To power the West Mill, Strutt needed a new and very much larger weir. An outline of this structure appears on a plan of 1796, and building began soon after. As the name suggests, the weir is of distinctive shape. It was modified and increased in height in 1819 and 1843 yet remains largely unaltered. The weir and its associated watercourses altered the river significantly. By 1820, some 5.8 hectares of water had been added to the Derwent immediately above Bridge Foot. Rees’s Cyclopaedia, which was published serially between 1802 and 1820, described the mills at Belper as being “on a scale and most complete we have ever seen, in their dams and their water works”. It is one of the outstanding engineering structures of the late 18th century.
It is said to have been built in 1832, two years
after William Strutt’s death and though he
may not have supervised its construction it is
clearly a late development of his methods of fire-proofing.
It is L-shaped, is built of coursed stone and has a hipped slate roof. The
interior is of a vaulted construction with brick floors above. It has iron
beams and cast iron columns linked by wrought iron tie rods.
The building is eight bays long and two asymmetrical
bays wide. The eastern facade has seven pairs of iron-framed
windows each with a centre casement. It has double loading
doors.
In a recess on the south wall, where the ‘Turkey Red’ building once stood, has been placed the mill bell dated 1781. To the east of this are re-erected columns from the sdemolished building.
It was built c.1800 and may well have been designed
as an ‘eating’ room. It is a plain
building, built of coursed stone with chamfered corners
on the ground floor and has a
slate roof.
This tall round brick mill chimney dominated
the site. It was built in the late 19th century,
replacing an earlier one that already existed
in 1832.
