Quarry Bank Mill

[poliphilo]

Quarry Bank Mill at Styal was opened in the 1780s and is now a working museum. We went there with Ruth, my sister-in-law. I now know about carding and spinning and weaving and have some idea of the hellishness of factory work in the early years of the industrial revolution. Samuel Greg, the owner of Quarry Bank, was a model employer by the standards of the age, but still expected his child "apprentices"- boys and girls- to work 13 hours a day, six days a week. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find the garden has changed. In fact, I don't believe it was open to the public before last year.

[goddlefrood.livejournal.com]

It must be 30 years since I went last. The building looks much as it did then. I couldn't tell you if the gardens were open back then, it was not widely visited except by school groups at that time.

On an unrelated note, I kept meaning to pass on this link:

http://www.readbookonline.net/books/Balzac/14/

Don't know if it'll have any stories you haven't read, but it may, there's a lot there.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I visited the mill with a school group about 25 years ago.

Thanks for the Balzac link. There are some titles there I recognise and some I don't. I reckon some of them may be early rarities.

[goddlefrood.livejournal.com]

I'll get to Balzac soon enough. Oddly enough, around the time your first review of his work appeared I'd been saving links all over the net to various bits of his. It's time to start reading some of them. Some at the readbooksonline site looked to be unavailable elsewhere, excepting antiquarian bookshops maybe.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The English speaking world is woefully ignorant of Balzac. The more I read the more my admiration grows.

[goddlefrood.livejournal.com]

This year, apparently. Still, the mill hasn't changed much and it was those photos I was looking at, not the garden ;-)

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART55060.html

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, the mill is pretty much as it always was.

So this is the first year the garden has been open to the public. Nice.

[goddlefrood.livejournal.com]

Maybe next time I'm up, which could be fairly soon, I may go along. Meanwhile, as I have to be in Court at the bizarrely early hour of 8.15 a.m. I'll be off.