Pendle Mills (edited)

This is Pendle Mills - once one of the many cotton mills that sprang up along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal in the 1800's. Bales of cotton would be unloaded from ships at Liverpool Docks onto the waiting barges and transported to Lancashire and Yorkshire to be spun and woven into cloth.
Nowadays these Victorian mills are mostly shopping outlets filled to the gunnels with mass produced clothing, household textiles and giftware from China, Turkey and other far flung places. They can't possibly sell all that stuff so where does it end up? Landfill, or shipped back the far East to be shredded? As we walked around I tried to imagine what it would have been like when it was a working mill. Clouds of cotton fibres  would have filled the air, clogging up people's airways and the clatter of machinery would have been deafening, the workers having to shout to each other or using their own sign language - they were excellent lip readers. The hours they worked were far longer than the hours put in by the shop assistants in the stores today and the children who were employed would be not much older than my young grandkids. There was no health and safety either; the kids would be ducking and diving amongst the running machinery. 
Although I'm not a fan of these large retail outlets (we went there today because it was next door to B&Q) I'm glad they have largely kept the character of the old mill buildings with the tall chimneys and zig zag glass roofs. Also they do provide employment for the local people.