North Street, Belper

I spent part of my teenage years in the Derbyshire Derwent Valley, at a time when its industrial heritage was largely intact but about to disappear.  On my way to school I watched most of Jedediah Strutt’s late-eighteenth century mills knocked down;  I rode my bike the length of canal from Butterley Tunnel (now buried under the A.38 trunk road), past Bull Bridge Aqueduct (blown up for road-widening) and through Hag Tunnel (vanished between a dyeworks reservoir and a gas-treatment plant) all the way to Cromford;  I climbed George Stephenson’s ‘Steep’ inclined railway (largely destroyed by the same gas plant).  I watched the Blue Pullman go past as I delivered newspapers in the final years that expresses ran between Derby and Manchester via Miller’s Dale and Doveholes.

It was because so much of this internationally significant industrial heritage was disappearing, threatened or simply not understood that from the start of the 1970s local people and academics began campaign after campaign to safeguard the mills and industrial housing of Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey.  The local authorities safeguarded the routes of the Cromford Canal and the Cromford & High Peak Railway, and volunteers helped to bring back to life the Leawood Pump and the Middleton Top Winding Engine.  Preserved railways have restored trains to surviving stretches of trackbed.  The National Tramway Museum thrives in a limestone quarry first developed by George Stephenson.  Sir Richard Arkwright’s Masson Mill is now a shopping centre;  his home at Willersley Castle is now a hotel.

This upsurge of interest, energy and enterprise was rooted in a vibrant collaboration between local people, industrial archaeologists and historians, enlightened local politicians, industrial leaders and leading public figures such as the late and present Dukes of Devonshire.  The nomination of the valley as a World Heritage Site in 2001 set the seal on these efforts and promised to attract visitors and relieve pressure on Britain’s first national park, the Peak District.

Yet there is so much yet to develop.  Many of the historic mills and empty or underused.  There is no coherent transport plan to allow tourists to get about the valley without cars.  The area lacks the coherent signage that makes the multiplicity of sites around Ironbridge coherent and navigable.

The language of the World Heritage News bulletin [www.derwentvalleymills.org] makes me wonder, though.  A masterplan is working to “develop the strategic vision” in Derby and Belper, and to define “how specific projects will be delivered”.  A feasibility study looks at “viable usage options” for the Darley Abbey Mills, which involves “access and public realm issues to consider”.  A river bus is proposed, and “completion of the masterplan will play a part in how this project moves forward.”

I wonder, do we actually need this plethora of plans?  Is the slow progress in developing the site the result of a lack of planning since the 1970s?  Or is it because the administrative mills grind slowly?

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Arkwright’s Mill, Cromford

We used Cromford Mill as a lunch-stop on the recent Waterways & Railways across the Derbyshire Peak tour.  The Cromford Canal starts – for significant historical reasons – alongside the mills, and it was the most logical location for a lunch break between exploring the canal in the morning and moving on to its dizzy adjunct, the Cromford & High Peak Railway, in the afternoon.

It also gave the group members a brief opportunity to experience one of the most remarkable conservation projects in a remarkable area, the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.

Turn up as a tourist, and Arkwright’s Mill [https://www.cromfordmills.org.uk] provides an excellent café, numerous shopping opportunities and a world-class historic site that will be better interpreted when the new £2.5 million interpretation centre is finished.

Here is one of the “cradles of the Industrial Revolution”, where Richard Arkwright, as he then was, came in 1771 looking for sufficient water-power to drive his newly-patented spinning frame, which eventually took its place as one of the inventions that transformed the British textile industry.  It wasn’t exactly the first water-powered factory in the world – the Derby Silk Mill started work in 1704 – but Arkwright’s mills at Cromford, and the community that grew around this remote spot, pioneered the development of cotton and woollen towns across Britain and the world.

Further down the Derwent valley Arkwright’s associates built the mills at Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey;  Arkwright himself extended his operations to Wirksworth, Bakewell and into Lancashire and Scotland.  Robert Owen’s New Lanark, Titus Salt’s Saltaire are in direct line of descent.  There is a version of Cromford at Ratingen in Germany, and another at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which was started by a Strutt apprentice from Belper called Samuel Slater (otherwise “Slater the Traitor”).

When I first knew Cromford well, helping out at the bicentennial Arkwright Festival in 1971, the cotton mills were a workaday, heavily polluted colour works, nobody visited Cromford except for occasional industrial archaeologists and, less than a decade before, Matlock Rural District Council had firm plans to demolish much of North Street (1776), one of the very first examples of planned industrial housing in the world.

That so much has been achieved to transform Cromford into an internationally significant tourist site is largely the work of the Arkwright Society, led for many years by Dr Chris Charlton, and still working hard to develop further one of the most fascinating stretches of historical clandscape in Britain.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.