Darley Abbey

Four Houses and Lavender Row

The early factory village the Evans family created in Darley Abbey for their millworkers has survived almost completely intact. It is in no sense a planned or model community having grown incrementally over at least 50 years and no obvious pattern is discernible in its growth.

The Evans family acquired a number of houses when they purchased the existing mills in Darley Abbey and some of these were pressed into service to accommodate the first mill families. It is not clear when they began to build their own housing.

Four Houses

These four three-stores houses are built of brick and slate in the ‘cluster house’ form (semi-detached and back-to-back). Each house was originally 45 square metres internally. They were completed in 1792, an early experiment with the cluster house format, later to be adopted by Charles Bage in Shrewsbury and by William Strutt in Belper. Unlike the Belper cluster houses they do not have private gardens or pigsties, though they were provided with “necessaries” (lavatories) in 1796. They each had an allotment on land behind the Mile Ash houses.

Mile Ash Lane and Lavender Row

Along Mile Ash Lane are mill workers’ cottages built from 1792, including a long-stepped terrace of three-storey cottages from 1795/96.  Running behind this row is another, more elaborate, stepped terrace on Lavender Row built in the 1820/30s.

More information can be found at: http://www.derwentvalleymills.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/History_Communities_DarleyAbbey.pdf