Derwent Valley Mills: Cromford Water Power and the Factory Landscape

In the narrow limestone valley at Cromford in Derbyshire, a tall gritstone mill stands behind a wall of severe stone buildings, with a village of workers’ houses climbing the hill beside it. This is where Richard Arkwright began spinning cotton by water power in 1771, and the Derwent Valley Mills, the chain of mills and mill villages that followed downstream as far as Derby, are now a World Heritage Site. What makes the valley worth a full morning is not any single building but the way the parts fit together: brooks and weirs, mills and housing, a canal and an early railway, all still visible in their original relationship. The group explores it on Day 18 of our Canals and Railways in the Industrial Revolution tour, travelling from York to Birmingham.

Reading the Derwent Valley Mills as one landscape

UNESCO inscribed the Derwent Valley Mills in 2001 on the grounds that this valley saw the birth of the factory system, with new kinds of building put up to house Arkwright’s spinning machinery, and that it was the first place where industrial production took place on a large scale in a rural landscape. The protected area runs for about 24 kilometres (15 miles), from the edge of Matlock Bath in the north almost to the centre of Derby in the south, and contains four principal industrial settlements linked by the river: Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey.

The reason the valley survives so complete is that it was overtaken. When steam replaced water as the main source of power in the nineteenth century, the cotton industry moved to the coalfields and the big towns, and the Derwent mills were left largely as they were. As UNESCO puts it, the relationships between the mills, the canal, the railway and the workers’ housing are still plain to see. That is the best way to visit: not as a list of buildings, but as a working system laid out along a river.

Why Cromford? Water before the river

The first surprise is that Arkwright’s original mill was not powered by the River Derwent at all. Cromford was chosen for two smaller, steadier sources. One was Bonsall Brook, which runs down from the hills to the west. The other was Cromford Sough, a tunnel driven to drain water from the lead mines around Wirksworth. Neither gave a great volume of water, but both delivered a constant supply that hardly varied with the seasons, which mattered more to a mill that needed to run every day of the year.

The water was gathered and controlled with care. Channels and sluices sent it to the mill, or on Sundays to the canal. Cromford Pond, built in 1785 as a mill pound, still lies behind the Greyhound in the village centre, and Bonsall Brook emerges briefly from it before passing under the main road to the mill. The sough water crossed Mill Road on an aqueduct to an overshot waterwheel. The cast-iron aqueduct that replaced the earlier wooden one in 1821 is listed Grade I; it was shattered by a high-sided vehicle in 2002, and its reinstatement is still proposed.

The mill yard at Cromford

Arkwright had patented his water frame in 1769, a spinning machine that produced strong cotton yarn continuously and could be tended by unskilled workers. At Cromford he housed it in a new kind of building: a tall, narrow, many-windowed block designed around the machinery and the power that drove it. From 1772 the mill ran day and night on two twelve-hour shifts. Most of the workforce were women and children, the youngest just seven. The gate was shut at exactly six in the morning and six in the evening, and anyone who missed it lost a day’s pay and was fined another.

The site grew quickly. A second, larger mill followed in the mid-1770s; it was destroyed by fire in 1890. The first mill lost its top two storeys in another fire in 1929. Even so, the yard enclosed by its plain gritstone buildings gives an unusually complete picture of an early textile factory. The Arkwright Society bought the site in 1979, and it is now open daily with exhibitions, shops and places to eat.

Arkwright’s village: North Street and the Greyhound

A mill in a remote valley needed people, and people needed homes. In 1771 Arkwright built North Street, a row of three-storey gritstone houses for his first workforce. Each had one room on each floor, and the top floor was a workroom for framework knitting, lit by the long windows that still run across the upper storeys. The Landmark Trust, which looks after one of the houses, describes North Street as the earliest planned industrial housing in the world.

The village grew around the mill with everything a settled workforce required. Arkwright organised a weekly market and rewarded regular attenders, a Sunday school opened in 1785 for 200 children, and St Mary’s Church by the river was completed in 1797, five years after his death. The pattern of mill, housing, market and church, set out by one employer, became a template for industrial communities elsewhere.

Why did cotton spinning stop at Cromford?

Because the water ran out. The Meerbrook Sough, begun in 1772 about 30 metres lower than Cromford Sough to drain the lead mines more deeply, had reduced the flow reaching Arkwright’s mills by 1813, and the family lost a landmark lawsuit over their water rights. Cotton manufacturing at Cromford ceased after 1847. The site that had been chosen for its reliable water supply was undone by a change in that same supply.

Masson Mill: going to the river

A short distance up the valley at Matlock Bath, Masson Mill shows the next step. Built in 1783 to 1784 on the west bank of the Derwent, it was the only one of Arkwright’s Cromford mills powered by the river itself. A weir across the Derwent, unusually convex rather than concave in plan, raised the water to drive first a single wheel and, by about 1801, two. The original building of brick on a gritstone base, 21 bays long and five storeys high, was later raised by a storey and extended in the twentieth century.

Masson worked for far longer than Cromford. Turbines replaced the wheels in 1928, and the mill closed only in 1991, when it still employed 750 people. Today it houses a museum, and the river still turns hydroelectric generators on the site.

The Cromford Canal and Wharf

Water power solved one problem and transport remained another. Arkwright backed the Cromford Canal, authorised by Parliament in 1789 and built by William Jessop with Benjamin Outram. It ran 14½ miles from Cromford to the Erewash Canal and was completed in 1794, at nearly twice Jessop’s estimate. At its head, Cromford Wharf still has warehouse buildings from about 1794, with a later warehouse of about 1824.

The canal had water troubles of its own. In 1849 the Leawood Pumphouse was built to lift water from the Derwent into the canal, using a Cornish-type beam engine; it is now a working museum. Further along, at High Peak Junction, the canal met the Cromford and High Peak Railway, opened in 1830 and 1831, which used inclined planes to climb from the canal and exchanged freight with the boats below. Most of the canal was abandoned in 1944, but dredging in 2013 reopened 1.3 miles from the pumphouse to Cromford Wharf to narrowboats, and a towpath runs beside the water between them.

Belper: bridges, iron and the Strutt housing

Downstream at Belper, the Derwent was harnessed on a larger scale by Jedediah Strutt and his sons. Their first North Mill was completed in 1786 and burned down in 1803. William Strutt rebuilt it in 1804 as a fire-resistant building: cast-iron columns carry cast-iron beams, with shallow brick arches spanning about 9 feet between them, held together by concealed wrought-iron ties. This iron framing, built from the material whose early industrial story the group follows at Ironbridge Gorge, is often described as a forerunner of the skyscraper. The Strutts employed 2,000 people by 1833.

Belper’s housing is as instructive as its mills. Long Row, built between 1792 and 1797, originally comprised 77 houses in three terraces of sandstone and brick. The Clusters, begun in 1805, grouped four back-to-back houses into each block, every house with its own garden and outbuilding with a privy and pigsty. Jedediah Strutt’s chapel on Field Row dates from 1788. When George and Robert Stephenson’s North Midland Railway arrived in 1840, it cut through two of the Long Row terraces and passes under a series of road bridges through the town.

How the Derwent Valley spread the factory system

By 1788 there were more than 200 Arkwright-type mills in Britain, and the model travelled further still. An Arkwright mill at Ratingen near Düsseldorf began production in 1784, the first in mainland Europe, and Samuel Slater, a former apprentice of Jedediah Strutt, founded Slater Mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In Scotland, Arkwright visited the Falls of Clyde in 1784 with David Dale, and the mills built there were modelled on Cromford; the group sees the result at New Lanark, where water power and workers’ housing were later turned into an experiment in social reform.

How much walking is involved in the Derwent Valley?

A moderate amount, spread across several short visits. The day combines walking in Cromford village, the mill yard and along the canal at the wharf with coach transfers to Masson Mill and to Belper, where the group sees the bridges and mills. Village streets slope and some surfaces are uneven, so comfortable shoes are worthwhile. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of physical activity on most days.

Seeing the Derwent Valley Mills on the tour

Day 18 begins in York, the morning after Fountains Abbey, Harrogate and the National Railway Museum. In the Derwent Valley the group visits Cromford village, Cromford Mills and the canal, and Masson Mill, then continues to Belper before ending the day at the Thinktank science museum in Birmingham. The next day brings Birmingham’s canals and the Black Country Living Museum before the drive to Bristol. For how the valley fits into the whole route, from the Midlands through Wales, the north of England and Scotland and back to London, see our guide to Britain’s canals, railways and industrial heritage.

The tour runs for 23 days from Manchester to London in small groups of 6–14 travellers, with departures in April and September 2027. The full itinerary is on the Canals and Railways in the Industrial Revolution tour page.

Most of the workers’ houses in the valley are still lived in, and the brooks, weirs and channels that fed the mills still run. Walking from North Street to the mill yard and down to the wharf, it is possible to follow the logic of the first factory landscape in the order its builders worked it out: water first, then machines, then the people to tend them, and finally the canal to carry the yarn away.