Yorkshire Industrial Heritage

Addingham is a village and civil parish in the English county of West Yorkshire. It is situated near the A65, 6 miles (10 km) south east of Skipton, 3 miles (5 km) west of Ilkley, 19 miles (31 km) north west of Bradford and around 20 miles (32 km) north west of Leeds.

The earliest of the existing houses were built in the 17th century when the village was a farming community, but the real growth began in the late 18th century and early 19th century when the textile industry arrived and five working mills, plus other loomshops and weaving sheds, were established, and the village developed into a busy industrial community.

John Cunliffe, a cloth manufacturer, and John Cockshott, a glazier and woolstapler, took advantage of the new developments in technology and leased land on the side of the River Wharfe in 1787 at the site now known as Low Mill. They built a spinning mill which enabled yarn to be spun more quickly than by hand and thus increased the production of cloth. A weir was constructed on the river and a wheel installed to provide the power. It was the first successful worsted mill in the world.

The start of the 19th century saw the textile industry begin to thrive in the village - existing mills, such as the one at High Mill which had been built in 1787 to produce corn, were converted and extended and used for linen, cotton, worsted and finally silk spinning, while other new mills were built, such as Town Head Mill and Fentimans, the latter of which was built in 1802 originally to spin cotton and was later converted into a sawmill in the 1860s. Several small workshops were also built, as well as three story high workers' houses, in which the lower two floors would be for domestic use, and the top floor would house the looms, with inter-connecting doors along the row of houses. These buildings still exist today, and examples can be seen on Stockinger Lane.

In 1826, Low Mill, now under the tenancy of Jeremiah Horsfall, was the scene of a Luddite uprising.

By the end of the 19th century, there were five operating mills in the village, three of them owned by Lister

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Additional information

Woolcombers Worsteds and Watermills: Addingham's Industrial Revolution (Addingham Civic Society, 2015) by Kate Mason tells the story of Addingam's industry from the time when woolcombers and weavers worked in local farmhouses, until the closure of the mills in the 1960's and '70's.

Map of Addingham with its 10 textile mills ().