Queen Street Mill

We need to be in Blackburn tomorrow for a PAGB print competition, so thought we'd have a day out today and explore some places on the way over.

We first stopped at the panopticon at Wycoller Country Park.  We didn't plan to stop here, but spotted a sign and diverted off our route to find it.  Was worth it, it's an interesting structure.

We then drove through to Queen Street Mill in Burnley, where we had lunch and then a two hour guided tour with someone who'd retired from a career in textiles manufacture and definitely knew his stuff.

We had a tour around the various machines, some older manual ones through to modern automatic ones.  At one point he handed over to another guide who switched on one of the later machines, used until the 1980s.  It made quite the racket on its own, and we could see the cloth being produced as it ran.

The blip shows a room full of 330 of these machines.  This is just a third of the machines that were in the mill when it closed in the early 1982.  It was bought later that decade by the local council and turned into a museum.  They're hoping to restart the coal fired boilers to run the place, but still have some bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

The tour was fascinating, especially showing us machines that were still in used when we were children.