machine women

Where have all the chimneys gone? (by Luan Blake)

The journey to Lanacashire was enveloped with nostalgia and anticiapation. On childhood trips to visit relatives, I always felt I was ‘coming home’.
I loved Barm cakes, I loved the dialect, I loved the fact my northern accent would come back, I loved the way my Aunty would call me ‘Cock’.

But It was really the poetry of the landscape that got me, carved out of valley and moor, factories and mills with their tall smoking stacks. Cobbled streets, viaducts and lines of working class houses with back alleys. It was this Industrial landscape in all its smokey glory that I loved, so different from Devon where I grew up.

So here we were travelling back to Oswaldtwistle to visit my Nana who worked in the Cotton Industry as a weaver, as well as working in munitions and other factories during her life. She would be my first port of call.

Oswaldtwistle is in the borough of Hyndburn in North West Lancashire. At one time, it had over 25 Mills, with Cotton Spinning and Printing being the chief industries. James Hargreaves was born in Oswaldtwistle, the inventor of the Spinning Jenny. The people of Oswaldtwistle were involved in the power-loom riots of 1826. The mechanisation of the textile industry with the introduction of looms powered by steam engines from the 1820s onwards resulted in redundancies, low wages, and starvation. On 26 April a large number of cotton workers attacked the White Ash factory (Brookside Mill) in Oswaldtwistle, about a mile from Hargreaves' workshop, destroying looms and other equipment. The riots went on for three days, extending to all cotton towns in central Lancashire.

Forward wind to today, and there are no chimneys left, no mills, no industry. The only remaining mill building is the old Moscow Mill, now turned into a miserable shopping complex called ‘Ossie Mills’ The town appears somewhat redundant now, like the mining towns of Wales, or the steel making towns of the North and the ship building areas of the North East. It seems to have been abandoned, it has lost its purpose, it is out of work.