Derby Silk Mill

Jul 14, 2007 Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment Archaeology, Derby Silk Mill, Derwent Valley, Heritage, Industrial Archaeology, UK, UNESCO

Derby Silk Mill, now Derby Indus­trial Museum.

This is my entry for the Your Nearest Site car­ni­val. Derby Silk Mill is argu­ably the world’s old­est fact­ory. The Derwent Val­ley Mills con­sor­tium cer­tainly argued that it was and as a res­ult the site, along with 867 build­ings along the Derwent Val­ley, were added to the UNESCO World Her­it­age List. The reason for adding these build­ings to the lists is that they are part of the dawn of the Indus­trial Revolution.

In the sev­en­teenth cen­tury the eco­nomy of Derby­shire was agri­cul­tural. In the eight­eenth cen­tury this began to change. The Silk Mill was built on the banks of the Derwent in Derby. A giant water wheel drove a shaft which in turn drove the looms. Wiki­pe­dia has a col­our­ful story which I missed at the museum. One of the design­ers of the mill, John Lombe, is said to have copied the design for the spin­ning wheels from Italian silk weavers. Lombe died in 1722 in mys­ter­i­ous cir­cum­stances. The design was copied for use else­where in the North, other factor­ies in the Derwent Val­ley Mills site were build for man­u­fac­tur­ing cot­ton. Along the banks of the Derwent the pat­tern of set­tle­ment changed. Now people were needed to man the factor­ies as well as to tend the land. The increased pop­u­la­tion drew in fur­ther people to provide for the grow­ing mar­ket. This pat­tern would be copied around the world.

A silk loom in the museum.

The cur­rent state of the mill is a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment. The interior was gut­ted by a fire in 1910 and the build­ing was then bought by a chem­ist. Remod­el­ling of the inside means little sur­vives today. In the grounds around the mill there are found­a­tions which reveal more about the lay­out of the fact­ory. In the absence of any­thing from the ori­ginal build­ing there are gen­eral exhib­its on the theme of industry. The upper floor has a room with small exhibit on the ori­ginal fact­ory, with a loom like one that could have been used in the fact­ory. The remainder of the upper floor is divided between exhib­its on industry in Derby­shire in gen­eral, like lead min­ing, and the rail­way engin­eer­ing which is still part of Derby’s cur­rent indus­trial base.

The lower floor was part his­toric photo exhib­i­tion and part dis­play of vari­ous Rolls-Royce aero-engines. The com­pany is another major employer in the city. None of this is bad, but they’re exhib­its which could be placed with equal rel­ev­ance in any other build­ing in the city. It seems a shame given the import­ance of the site that so little of the place has any of the machinery which trans­formed the economy.