Qualla: Quarry Bank Mill

Quarry Bank Mill: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Step inside Quarry Bank Mill and the first thing you hear is water. Not the river outside, but the heavy controlled rush of a 32-foot iron wheel turning beneath the building, set into a pit sunk below the level of the River Bollin so that the full head of the dammed water falls onto it. The wheel was designed by Thomas Hewes and operated from 1818, and the one running today is its near twin, a 25-foot Fairbairn wheel rescued from Glasshouses Mill in North Yorkshire and installed here in 1983. It still drives the looms. Quarry Bank is the most complete cotton factory of the Industrial Revolution left in Britain, and that low rumble is the sound of the machine age the way it actually sounded.

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Quarry Bank Mill: Pownall Fee, 1784

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Samuel Greg leased land at a place called Quarrell Hole on the Pownall Fee from Lord Stamford, who attached an unusual condition to the lease: none of the surrounding trees were to be pruned, felled, or lopped. The wood had to stay. Greg accepted the term, partly because he wante...

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Quarry Bank Mill: The Great Wheel

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first wheel here was a wooden overshot, fed by a long leat from upstream. Peter Ewart built a second wooden wheel in 1801 and dammed the Bollin to deliver water directly. A small iron suspension wheel followed in 1807. Then in 1818, the Great Wheel came. Hewes solved the prob...

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Quarry Bank Mill: Spinning, Then Weaving

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1784 building ran 2,425 spindles. By 1805 a second wheel and a five-storey extension pushed it to 3,452. Robert Hyde Greg, taking over after his father's death in 1834, introduced power-loom weaving, and weaving sheds went up in 1836 and 1838 to house 305 looms. Quarry Bank's...

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Quarry Bank Mill: The Apprentice House

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 1790 and 1841, Quarry Bank ran on the labour of children. They came from workhouses, the Poor Law guardians of Hackney and Chelsea at first and later mostly from Liverpool and the nearby parishes. By 1833 they made up about 20 per cent of the workforce; in the early decad...

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Quarry Bank Mill: Cotton and Conscience

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Gregs were Unitarians, they provided medical care for all workers, and Hannah Greg pushed her husband toward what was for the period a comparatively humane labour policy. They were also part of a wider family commerce that included plantations worked by enslaved people in Dom...

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