Cotton mills

Cotton mills began to open towards the end of the 18th century as demand for spun cotton began to increase at the start of the industrial revolution.

The earliest mills originated in the UK and were water-powered so were built low and thin next to rivers. Midlands business man Richard Arkwright was a pioneer of the cotton mill, building one of the first water-powered cotton mills Masson Mill close to Matlock in Derbyshire around the 1780s.

The earlier cotton mills were small and contained just one or two pieces of machinery. But as the mechanisation of the spinning process developed, so the mills grew to larger sizes, containing more and more machinery and churning out greater volumes of spun cotton.
By the mid-late 1800s, over a hundred years after the first mills began to open in the UK, there were close to 2,200 cotton mills across the UK employing close to half a million workers. Lancashire was by far the most dominant county for cotton mills, with over 1900 in this one county alone.

The early 20th century saw the peak in cotton mill production in the UK but this all changed at the outset of war in 1914. Resurgence in cotton needs in the late 1920s saw cotton mills once again thriving but, by this time, competition particularly from the United States and later India and China saw the UK cotton industry begin to suffer again post-World War II.

Now in modern times, the cotton mills that stand around the UK are generally all either odes to the industrial heritage, such as the early Masson Mill in Derbyshire, or have been converted for use as homes or office space.

But whatever their modern day use, the history and legacy of the UK's cotton mill heyday lives on in the old cotton mill buildings themselves.