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Wednesday, 30th July 2003

The Mills

Lancashire mill workers

Between Jersey Street and Redhill Street, half a mile from Piccadilly Gardens alongside the Rochdale Canal you'll find 'dark satanic mills'. There is a campaign to get these and the central warehouses registered as a World Heritage Site with UNESCO. Presently most of the mills are derelict. The oldest is Murray's Mill of 1798, and the last is from 1912. French writer Alexis de Toqueville commented in the 1830s about the largest here, McConnel and Kennedy: '1,500 workers labouring 69 hours a week... three quarters of the workers in (the) factory are women and children.' To visitors the scale of the new industrial process was something far beyond their range of experience. 'Here are buildings seven to eight storeys, as high and as big as the Royal Palace in Berlin,' said the German architect Schinkel in 1825.

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The Mills

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