The Industrial Heritage Group

Leader:  Mike Stow - indhist@ashbyu3a.co.uk - phone 01530 469152

The Industrial Heritage Group is for members who have an interest in our industrial heritage of trains, cars, planes, bikes, early manufacturing etc. to visit museums, railways, factories and other places related to our industrial past. We occasionally take a quite broad view of what constitutes "Industrial Heritage" if it is of interest to us!

Travel arrangements vary depending on how far we have to travel, but generally we meet in Ashby to car-share.

Our trips are normally on Wednesdays unless otherwise stated.

All dates below are provisional until stated otherwise

Wednesday 22nd July. Macclesfield Silk Museum and Paradise Mill

Despite the best attempts by traffic delays, diversions and road works, we all managed to get to the Silk Museum in time for tea, coffee and biscuits before our guide for the morning, Tim, took us down the road to the Paradise Silk Mill, which opened in 1862 but only closed in 1981. It is the last surviving of the 71 mills in Macclesfield which at one time housed 5000 looms, making Macclesfield the world’s largest producer of finished silk.

Tim started with the story of the silk worm and how and why it produces its silk cocoon and how the Chinese managed to extract the fibre from the cocoon to weave it into garments. The earliest known use of silk dates back 8500 years and the oldest surviving fabric is from about 3630 BCE. The Chinese maintained a monopoly on silk production until around 1000 AD.

Macclesfield became a centre for silk weaving because it was near to the Lancashire cotton mills and the machinery required was similar. There was also a silk-covered button industry in the town already.

Because silk is such a premium product, silk weaving was not a stable business subject to the economic conditions at any one time and also latterly by the arrival of manmade materials such as nylon and polyester. Latterly automated looms reduced the number of skilled men needed and replaced them with female machine minders who were paid much less, similar to the cotton and wool trades.

Paradise Mill still has a room full of hand looms. Much of it’s custom was for military officer’s ties. As the Army vastly increased in size for WWI business boomed but fell back afterwards; by WWII nylon was used for ties which was much cheaper material and couldn’t justify the cost of skilled labour to weave it. Automated machines had taken over.

One interesting fact about hand operated silk looms was the use of punch cards to control the loom to weave patterned material automatically. This was the Jacquard mechanism and the punch cards are considered to be the precursor of computing as they used binary code to control a machine.

Tim demonstrated various machines to us and explained all the processes whilst continuing to relate all the history. A very tricky job well done.

We then had a short time (not enough really) to look around the museum and its fascinating trinkets, souvenirs, posters and artefacts before heading off to lunch at Sutton Hall, which was recommended to us by the museum staff.

This large country house was once home to the Earls of Lucan and also a convent! But it is now a very fine pub. There must have been a couple of hundred customers in the house and garden and service was a little slow, but the food was pretty good, a cut above the usual, and the house is amazing.

There is no outing in August as most venues are overrun with holidaymakers and children.

Previous trips