# Derwent Valley Mills

World Heritage Site, where water-powered cotton-spinning mills were first built in the UK

Belper, United Kingdom

Landscape

## Story

• Derwent Valley Mills is an industrial landscape along the River Derwent in Derbyshire, from Matlock Bath through Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey into Derby.
• John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill in Derby, and then Richard Arkwright’s cotton mills at Cromford from 1771, established the factory system that was copied through the valley and beyond it.
• Jedediah Strutt’s mills and workers’ housing at Belper and Milford, and Thomas Evans’s settlement at Darley Abbey, carried cotton spinning here into the early nineteenth century, before the trade shifted toward Lancashire.
• The mills, weirs, canal, railway and rows of houses were inscribed in 2001, and many of the buildings are still lived in, worked in, or opened to visitors.
• A 2013 excavation at the Darley Abbey weir found a late medieval timber and stone mill, and the poor repair of the Belper mills remains an urgent problem for the property.

## Visiting

From 31 March to 25 October the Mill Yard at Cromford is open from 9:00am to 5:00pm. From 1 November the Mill Yard gates open from 9:00am to 4:00pm, and the visitor centre opens from 10:00am to 4:00pm. Admission to the Mill Yard, the shops and the exhibition is free. Tickets for the Mill Manager’s Pass cost £14.50 for an adult and £2.50 for a child aged 12 to 16, and children under 12 go free.
Tickets for the Arkwright Experience cost £7.50 for an adult and £2.50 for a child aged 12 to 16, and children under 12 go free. Tickets can be bought online or in the Mill Yard shop on the day, and a carer’s ticket is free. Assistance dogs are allowed to enter, including the cafés, and other dogs are welcomed on the Cromford site, although each shop sets its own rule. At Belper, tickets for tours on Wednesdays and Saturdays from March to October, at 11:00am and 1:30pm, cost £7.50 for an adult, accompanied children under 16 are free, and an online booking adds a fee of £0.36.

## History

The Derwent Valley Mills follow the River Derwent in Derbyshire from the edge of Matlock Bath to the centre of Derby, through Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey. The property covers 1,228.7 hectares, with a buffer of 4,362.7002 hectares, a length also given as about 24 kilometres or 15 miles. It was inscribed in 2001, one account placing the designation in December of that year, and a partnership of local authorities and public bodies manages it.

Silk spinning on the river came before cotton. Thomas Cotchett’s water-powered mill in Derby, built by George Sorocold, failed. John Lombe and his brother Thomas then had a five-storey mill built on an Italian pattern, with the patent placed in 1718 or 1719 and the building in 1721 or 1722.

John Lombe died in Derby on 20 November 1722. By 1763 only seven mills of that type had been built, because the silk market was small.

Richard Arkwright, born in Preston on 23 December 1732, patented a spinning frame in 1769 and a carding engine in 1775. With Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need he leased a site at Cromford in August 1771, served by the Bonsall Brook and the Cromford Sough. One account puts the first successful water-powered cotton mill in 1771, and another says it was operational by 1774, with a second mill begun in 1776 or 1776–77. Housing, a Sunday school and two thirteen-hour shifts held a workforce in which many of the hands were children.

Jedediah Strutt took the system to Belper and Milford. The first mills there are dated both to 1778 and 1782 and to the span 1776–81. His son William Strutt rebuilt Belper North Mill in iron and brick in 1804 after the mill of 1786 burned in 1803.

Thomas Evans built a cotton mill at Darley Abbey in 1782, and that settlement grew from 615 people in 1801 to 1,170 in 1831. A fish-pass excavation in 2013 found a timber and stone mill under the weir, with interim timber dates of 1453 and 1478 through 1510–1535, and a finished account giving 1536 as the latest modification.

The cotton trade shifted toward Lancashire in the early nineteenth century, and the mills, the houses, the Cromford Canal and the Cromford and High Peak Railway stayed in the rural valley. The canal opened in 1794 and closed in 1944. The railway was authorised in 1825, opened in 1830 and 1831, and closed in 1967.

Arkwright’s patent case was decided against him in 1785, a year also given as the expiry of the patents, and by 1788 more than 200 mills of his type stood in Britain. Samuel Slater, apprenticed to Strutt at Milford, carried the machines to Pawtucket, and David Dale, after walking the ground with Arkwright in 1784, established the mills at New Lanark.

Cromford was bought for conservation in 1979, and the cost of restoration later reached £48 million. The designation rested on the new factory buildings and on industrial settlements placed in a rural landscape. A mission from 31 January to 2 February 2024, and a public account that August, treated the poor condition of the Belper mills and a series of new buildings as a serious threat. In the 2025 update, applications for the North Mill and the East Mill were still undecided.

## Photographs

- [Derwent Valley Mills — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Arkwright_Masson_Mills.jpg)
- [Cromford Wharf, Cromford. — Gregory Deryckère](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Cromford_Wharf_-_Canal_end_29-04-06.jpg)
- [Northern Warehouse at Cromford Wharf, Cromford. — Gregory Deryckère](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Cromford_Wharf_-_House_29-04-06.jpg)
- [A view of Belper: Belpers East mill built 1912 — Marilyn11](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/BelpermillEast.JPG)
- [Unlikely tall Wall near the central substation, Derby. The building behind is the Silk Mill. — Russ Hamer](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/TallWallRH.JPG)
- [View of weavers' housing, North Street, Cromford, Derbyshire — Alethe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/North_St%2C_Cromford.jpg)
- [A composite diagram of the watercourses. Orginally The sough originally drained into the brook back in the village, both powered the original mill. The sough — chevin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Cromford_mill_watercourses.jpg)
- [shots from the Cromford Mills Area — craig carter from DERBYSHIRE, UK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Cromford_Wharf_2008.jpg)
- [Did rain alot, but still a great place to go. — Holly Victoria Norval](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Derwent_Valley_heaven_%288344764225%29.jpg)
- [Did rain alot, but still a great place to go. — Holly Victoria Norval](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Derwent_Valley_heaven_%288345818844%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Derwent Valley Mills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derwent_Valley_Mills) — Wikipedia
- [Richard Arkwright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright) — Wikipedia
- [John Lombe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lombe) — Wikipedia
- [Jedediah Strutt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedediah_Strutt) — Wikipedia
- [George Sorocold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sorocold) — Wikipedia
- [Benjamin Outram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Outram) — Wikipedia
- [David Dale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dale) — Wikipedia
- [Samuel Slater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater) — Wikipedia
- [Florence Nightingale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale) — Wikipedia
- [George Stephenson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stephenson) — Wikipedia
- [Belper North Mill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belper_North_Mill) — Wikipedia
- [Derwent Valley Mills](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1030/) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
- [History of the Derwent Valley Mills](https://www.derwentvalleymills.org/discover/derwent-valley-mills-history/) — Derwent Valley Mills Partnership
- [Cromford Mill Complex](https://www.derwentvalleymills.org/discover/derwent-valley-mills-history/derwent-valley-mills-key-sites/cromford-mill-complex/) — Derwent Valley Mills Partnership
- [Visit Cromford Mills](https://www.cromfordmills.org.uk/visit/) — Cromford Mills
- [Mill tours at Cromford](https://www.cromfordmills.org.uk/visit/mill-tours/) — Cromford Mills
- [Visit Strutt’s North Mill](https://www.belpernorthmill.org.uk/visit/) — Strutt’s North Mill
- [Strutt’s North Mill Belper](https://www.belpernorthmill.org.uk/) — Strutt’s North Mill
- [State of conservation report, Derwent Valley Mills, 2025](https://whc.unesco.org/document/219159) — World Heritage Centre
- [Grave concern over the valley’s world heritage status](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly3djvz5vvo) — BBC
- [Darley Abbey Fish Pass: final report on an archaeological watching brief](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1246619&recordType=GreyLitSeries) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Timber mill (site of), Darley Abbey Fish Weir](https://her.derbyshire.gov.uk/Monument/MDR15180) — Derbyshire Historic Environment Record
- [Darley Abbey Mills bridge heritage statement](https://www.derby.gov.uk/media/derbycitycouncil/contentassets/documents/transport/darleyabbeymillsbridge/heritage-statement-baseline-understanding.pdf) — Derby City Council
- [Arkwright Masson Mills.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arkwright_Masson_Mills.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cromford Wharf - Canal end 29-04-06.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cromford_Wharf_-_Canal_end_29-04-06.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cromford Wharf - House 29-04-06.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cromford_Wharf_-_House_29-04-06.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [BelpermillEast.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BelpermillEast.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [TallWallRH.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TallWallRH.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [North St, Cromford.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_St,_Cromford.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cromford mill watercourses.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cromford_mill_watercourses.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cromford Wharf 2008.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cromford_Wharf_2008.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Derwent Valley heaven (8344764225).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derwent_Valley_heaven_(8344764225).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Derwent Valley heaven (8345818844).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derwent_Valley_heaven_(8345818844).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Derwent Valley Mills is a stretch of the River Derwent in Derbyshire, from the edge of Matlock Bath in the north to the centre of Derby in the south. The property covers 1,228.7 hectares, with a buffer of 4,362.7002 hectares, and is also given as 12.3 square kilometres. It runs for about 24 kilometres, or 15 miles, through Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey. The river supplied the water that turned the mill wheels. The mills, the workers’ houses, the weirs, and the canal and railway that served them were inscribed in 2001, and one account places that designation in December 2001. A partnership of local authorities and public bodies manages the property. A management plan was described as last revised in January 2007, and a later plan covers 2020 to 2025.

The valley holds the communities that grew around the mills, not a single building. One count gives 838 listed buildings, sixteen in the highest grade, forty-two in the next, and 780 in the third, with nine further structures scheduled as ancient monuments. Another count gives 848 buildings of special architectural or historical interest, again with nine scheduled monuments, and thirteen conservation areas lying wholly or partly inside the property. Many of the houses are still lived in. Some mills contain museums, workshops, or other businesses. The cotton trade itself left the valley in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Lancashire was better placed for raw cotton and for markets, and the turn from water to steam carried the industry elsewhere. Because that shift happened, the mills and their settlements stayed in a rural landscape of fields and woods.

Silk, not cotton, came first. In the late seventeenth century the demand for silk in fashionable clothes was rising, and the Midlands had taken over from London as the centre for knitting silk stockings. Thomas Cotchett, who knew the silk weavers of Spitalfields, asked the engineer George Sorocold to build a mill on an island in the Derwent near the centre of Derby, using Dutch machines and water power. The experiment failed. John Lombe, then an employee of Cotchett, concluded that a perfected water-powered mill would still find a market. George Sorocold was born in Lancashire, in 1666 in one account and about 1668 in another, the son of James Sorocold and Elizabeth Barrow. He married Mary, daughter of Henry Franceys, on 7 December 1684, and by 1702 they had thirteen children, of whom eight survived. He had worked on town water supplies, including Derby’s waterworks of 1692, which pumped through about four miles of elm-wood pipe, and he had planned improvements to the navigation of the Derwent in 1695 and 1699. His death is placed about 1738, or at some time after 1738.

John Lombe was born in Norwich about 1693, the son of a worsted weaver, and was a younger half-brother of Thomas Lombe. Thomas sent him to Italy to study the machines that spun organzine, the raw-silk warp used for fine cloth. Italians had used power spinning since the early fifteenth century, and Vittorio Zonca had published a description. A legend says that the King of Sardinia, hearing of the Derby venture, sent a woman to England to kill the brothers. John Lombe died suddenly in Derby on 20 November 1722. Thomas Lombe obtained a patent for silk-throwing machinery in 1718, granted for fourteen years. Another account says that John patented the design in 1719. The mill is placed in 1721 for the brothers John and Thomas Lombe, and it is also described as completed in 1722, the year John died. It stood five storeys high, 33.5 metres by 12 metres, or 110 feet by 39 feet, beside Cotchett’s mill, which one account spells Crotchett. George Sorocold built it on the Italian pattern. The finished machines held 10,000 spindles, 25,000 spinning-reel bobbins, nearly 5,000 star wheels, over 9,000 twist bobbins and 46,000 winding bobbins, all driven by a single water wheel. While showing visitors round, Sorocold missed his footing, fell into the sluice, and was carried into the wheel. A paddle gave way and threw him into the mill tail.

By 1763, thirty years after the patent had expired, only seven mills of the Lombe type had been built, because the silk market was small and easily filled. The mill had still shown that water power and organised labour could be combined at a new scale. After a fire in 1910 the building was extensively reconstructed. It later housed an industrial museum, which closed on 3 April 2011 and was mothballed for more than two years. A programme to reopen it began in October 2013. It was rebranded in November 2021 as a museum of making, and it was then open four days a week.

Cotton had a wider market than silk, and spinning it was a harder process. Richard Arkwright was born in Preston on 23 December 1732, the youngest of seven surviving children of Thomas, a tailor and a Preston Guild burgess, and Sarah. His parents could not afford a school, so his cousin Ellen taught him to read and write. He was apprenticed to a barber, Mr Nicholson, at Kirkham, and in the early 1760s kept a barber’s and wig-maker’s shop at Churchgate in Bolton, where a waterproof dye for periwigs later helped to fund his prototypes. He married Patience Holt in 1755. Their son, Richard Arkwright junior, was born the same year. Patience died in 1756. In 1761 he married Margaret Biggins. They had three children, of whom only Susannah lived to adulthood. In 1768 he and the clockmaker John Kay worked on a spinning machine in rented rooms on Stoneygate in Preston, in a house later called Arkwright House. He patented the spinning frame in 1769. It used wooden and metal rollers rather than fingers, and at first it was turned by horses. The frames ranged from four spindles to ninety-six. The yarn was strong enough for warp, and unskilled attendants could watch the machines.

Lewis Paul had patented a carding machine in 1748. Arkwright improved it and in 1775 patented a carding engine that made a continuous skein before spinning. He also took out what he hoped would be a grand patent in 1775. With John Smalley of Preston he set up a small horse-powered factory in Nottingham. Horse power was a poor source. Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, hosiers with capital, joined him. In August 1771 the partners leased a narrow site at Cromford, close to a corn mill, served by the Bonsall Brook and by the Cromford Sough, a lead-mine drain. Neither stream was large, but both ran with little seasonal change. One account says the first water-powered mill, covering carding and spinning and employing 200 people, was built in 1771 and was the first successful mill of its kind. Another says the first mill was operational by 1774, and that construction of a second, larger mill began in 1776, or in 1776–77.

The upper mill, listed in the highest grade, was five storeys of coursed gritstone lined with brick, eleven bays, 28.5 metres by 7.9 metres, with timber beams and sash windows. A watercolour shows a cupola for the mill bell at the southern end. The main entrance, which Arkwright called the first door, has a Gibbs surround, and the windows have slightly arched wedge lintels. Recent research reads the original wheel as overshot, fed by an aqueduct that would have passed just above that door. In the late 1780s the mill was extended by four bays and given another power source. A fire in 1929 destroyed the two upper storeys. The building was re-roofed in asbestos sheet and used for colour pigments.

The second mill was 36 metres long and 8 metres wide, sixteen bays, six storeys with a clerestory attic. The lower courses were stone. It is not clear whether the upper walls were brick or stone. Recent excavation has exposed the ground plan, including the wheel pit, the offices and two privies. It is still unsettled whether the pit held one wheel or two, and whether the gable, not yet fully examined, contained a heating system. In this mill the staircase and offices sat inside the main rectangle and took space from production. An annexe of about 1790, four storeys of stone, put the hot-air heating inside a staircase turret next to the lavatories, so the floors stayed clear. A large stone building of 1785–90, five storeys, is thought to have held powered machinery on the upper floors, with cotton opened near the gate, cleaned in a sealed room, and an office or dinner house with an underdrawn ceiling. A lavatory stack and another hot-air system stood at the watercourse end. A brick bridge once linked it to the first mill above first-floor level. Only the lower part of that bridge survives. A three-storey neighbour of the same years has an apsidal end with a stair and a likely counting house, and a later brick arch between the two buildings carries a Guardian insurance plaque over the entrance.

Other buildings of about 1790 include a workshop whose upper floors may have held knitting frames, a warehouse whose second-floor windows stayed unglazed until the 1980s and which later stored cheese for the canal and then timber, and a stable and coach house later taken into a restaurant. A three-storey cottage inside a later shell is taken to be one of the cottages of 1771. The mill manager’s house of 1796, three storeys and three bays, looks over the yard. The present aqueduct, a cast-iron trough on stone piers dated 1821, replaced a timber launder and brought sough water to the first mill. A high vehicle shattered it in 2002. A bow-fronted building in existence by 1786 was badly damaged by fire in 1961 and then demolished, after it had been photographed. Oral tradition calls it the barracks, lodgings for unmarried men who lived too far away to travel home each day. Its foundations have been excavated and left visible. An earlier bridge over the Bonsall Brook carried the public road. The second mill blocked that road, and Arkwright cut a way through Scarthin Rock. The road was not brought down to valley level until 1818, when the turnpike toward Belper was made. The basin weir of about 1777, the wheel pits, a culvert of about 1820 toward the canal, and a large culvert of 1777 running out to the meadows and the Derwent are part of the same water system.

Arkwright’s discipline was as new as the machines. Work ran in two shifts of thirteen hours, with an overlap at the change. Bells rang at five in the morning and five in the evening. The gates shut at six, and a late worker was shut out for the rest of the day and lost another day’s pay. He wanted weavers with large families. Whole households were hired, including children as young as seven, an age later raised to ten. Toward the end of his time at Cromford, nearly two-thirds of about 1,150 employees were children. Employees had a week’s holiday if they did not leave the town. A Sunday school built in 1785 taught 200 children. He was less concerned with worship. The religious life of the village waited until 1797, when his son established Cromford church. The father had pictured a private chapel for the family at Willersley.

The existing village could not supply the labour, so housing had to be built if the mill was to keep its people. Peter Nightingale, a local landowner and the grand-uncle of Florence Nightingale, bought the Cromford estate for £20,000, built Rock House overlooking the mill as a residence for Arkwright, and gave a further £2,000 toward the second mill and £1,750 for workers’ housing. Another account says that in 1788 Arkwright bought an estate from William Nightingale, the father of Florence Nightingale, for the same sum of £20,000, and began Willersley Castle. Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 in Florence, where her parents were travelling, and she died on 13 August 1910 in London. Her father, William Edward Nightingale, had been born William Edward Shore and took the Nightingale name after inheriting the Lea estate from Peter Nightingale. Lea Hurst in Derbyshire was one of her early homes. She became a reformer of nursing and of hospital statistics, and that later public life is separate from the building of the mills. The £20,000 estate purchase and the family link are the points at which her name enters the valley’s story.

Between 1777 and 1783 Arkwright and his family built mills at Bakewell, Cressbrook, Rocester and Wirksworth, in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. In 1777 he leased Haarlem Mill at Wirksworth and installed the first steam engine used in a cotton mill. It refilled the millpond. It did not drive the machines. Masson Mill at Matlock Bath was begun in 1783. He leased Birkacre mill at Chorley, which was destroyed in the anti-machinery riots of 1779. He served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire and was knighted in 1786. He was a member of the Church of England, unlike many mill masters of the time who were nonconformists. He bought out his partners and was a difficult colleague. In 1781 he went to law to defend the grand patent. The case ran until 1785 and was decided against him, on the ground that his specifications were deficient. The court also heard claims that the spinning frame was the invention of his employee John Kay, or of Thomas Highs, Kay’s earlier employer. Another account says the patents expired in 1785. By 1788 more than 200 mills of the Arkwright type stood in Britain. Rivals had copied the machines with and without paying royalties.

Willersley Castle was built in 1791 and is listed in the second grade. A fire in 1792 destroyed it when it was newly finished, and Arkwright never lived there. It was rebuilt and first occupied by Richard Arkwright junior in 1796. Richard Arkwright died at Rock House on 3 August 1792, aged fifty-nine, leaving a fortune of £500,000. He was buried at St Giles in Matlock. His remains were later moved to the family chapel by the castle, now St Mary’s at Cromford. His son had little interest in cotton and sold most of the mills outside Cromford and Matlock Bath. The mills that were kept probably supported the Willersley estate. By 1789 the Cromford estate was back with the Arkwrights. A market place was laid out, a market was held every Sunday, and annual prizes went to those who attended most often. Clubs and societies followed. The attempt to make the village feed itself succeeded, and Cromford kept growing until about 1840, even after the mills had passed their peak. In the early nineteenth century the population levelled at about 1,200.

Jedediah Strutt, also spelled Jedidiah, was born in 1726 at South Normanton near Alfreton, the second son of William Strutt and Martha Statham, in a farming family. In 1740 he was apprenticed as a wheelwright at Findern. In 1754 he inherited a small stock of animals from an uncle. He married Elizabeth Woollatt, also spelled Woolatt, in 1755, moved to a farm at Blackwell, and carried coal from Denby to Belper and Derby. His brother-in-law William Woollatt employed a Mr Roper of Locko, who had an idea for an attachment to the stocking frame but not the capital to pursue it. Strutt sold a horse and paid Roper £5. They patented a workable machine in 1759. It became known as the Derby Rib, and the ribbed stockings sold well, because cotton was cheaper than silk and more comfortable than wool, and the yarn could not be spun fast enough by hand. Elizabeth died in London in 1774. In 1781 he married again. The infobox of his life names Anne Daniels. The narrative names Ann Cantrell, widow of George Daniels of Belper. There were no children of the second marriage. The children of the first were William, Elizabeth, Martha, George Benson and Joseph. Elizabeth married William Evans, son of Thomas Evans by his first wife. William Strutt married Barbara Evans, daughter of Thomas Evans by his second wife, and invented the Belper stove. Their son was Edward Strutt, later the first Baron Belper.

Strutt and Need met Arkwright in Nottingham, where the horse-powered frame was already unsatisfactory, and they knew that John Lombe’s silk mill in Derby had shown what water could do. Strutt was Arkwright’s partner in the first Cromford mill, then built on his own account. He bought land at Belper in 1777. Belper was then a hamlet of framework knitters and nail makers, and it already had a market, so he did not have to invent a town in the way Arkwright did at Cromford. One account says Belper mill opened in 1778. Another says the mills at Belper and Milford belong to 1776–81, and that the Belper mill was probably complete in 1781. A second Belper mill was added in 1784. He bought the old forge at Makeney by Milford Bridge from Walter Mather in 1781, and Milford mill is dated 1782, about two miles south of Belper and about eight miles south of Cromford. By 1793 two further mills had been added for printing and bleaching. By 1789 the Strutts reckoned they had invested £37,000, of which £26,000 was at Belper and £11,000 at Milford, and that the return was £36,000 a year. There were in time eight Strutt mills at Belper. The family kept building into the 1810s. By 1833 the business employed 2,000 people and dominated cotton in the valley. Belper’s population rose from 4,500 in 1801 to 7,890 in 1831, and one account puts the town at 10,000 by the middle of the nineteenth century, then the second largest town in the county. Long rows of houses were built for the workers. In 1817 Sunday schools taught 650 children at Belper and 300 at Milford. Jedediah Strutt died in Derby on 7 May 1797 after a lingering illness and was buried in the Unitarian chapel in Field Row, Belper, which he had built in 1788 or 1789. His last house, Friar Gate House in Derby, was designed by his son William.

The original North Mill at Belper, completed in 1786 by Jedediah Strutt, was destroyed by fire in 1803. Cotton dust burns readily, and fire then travels through timber floors. William Strutt rebuilt it in 1804 on the old foundations, in brick with an iron frame, one of the oldest surviving fireproof mills. It is 127 feet long, 31 feet wide and 63 feet high, or 39 by 9.4 by 19 metres, in fifteen bays, with two wings of 41.5 by 34 feet and six bays each. Cast-iron beams of a turtle-back section carry brick vaults spanning 9 feet. Wrought-iron ties hidden between the column heads resist the thrust. The floor over the wheel pit is hollow clay. The roof is slate, with internal gutters. A breast-shot suspension wheel by Thomas Hewes, 18 feet by 23 feet, took its power from the rim. A vertical shaft and horizontal shafts drove the machines by leather belts. Bales were opened on the ground floor. Carding, with 136 engines or, in another description, more than 130, was on the third and fourth floors. Sixteen drawing frames, also called lantern frames, and four stretching frames prepared the rovings. The first and second floors are said to have held thirty-four Arkwright water frames spinning 4,236 ends at once. A machinery list instead gives 80 spinning frames with 4,236 spindles. Mule frames were added later for finer yarn. Reeling, doubling and twisting were on the fifth floor, and the skeins went to Milford to be dyed. The attic became a schoolroom. In 1998 a water-power plant of 350 kilowatts, two turbines of 175 kilowatts each, was installed. A 2015 report for the borough said the North Mill and the East Mill had suffered significant damage, and a compulsory purchase was being considered. In the later nineteenth century the firm, slow to modernise and still using child labour where adults would have handled the larger machines better, leased or sold some of its mills.

Thomas Evans, a landowner at Darley Abbey, bought a further 7.1 hectares, or 18 acres, for £1,140, and in 1782 built a cotton mill. The settlement doubled between 1788 and 1801. From 1801 to 1831 the population rose from 615 to 1,170 as more workers’ houses were added. There was no market place, and feeding the village was a problem. A Sunday school for 80 children was held in one of the mills. A church was built in 1819 and a school in 1826. The Evans and Strutt families were joined by the marriages of William Evans to Elizabeth Strutt and of William Strutt to Barbara Evans.

Under the weir at Darley Abbey, older industry came to light during work on a fish pass. A watching brief in March to July 2013, for a pass built into an existing island so that it would not stand out in the landscape, was enlarged into an excavation when late medieval remains appeared. An interim account describes rubble from walls that had been removed, and lines of oak posts, and two nearly contemporary timber and stone platforms of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, whose purpose was still uncertain. It reads them as a likely mill complex run by the monks of Darley Abbey. The earliest timbers in that account date to 1453 and 1478, and the latest to 1510–1535, which may mark disuse at the dissolution of the monasteries. The finished account of 2014 calls the structure a timber and stone mill of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in use for several decades, with the latest dendrochronological modification in 1536, the year of the dissolution. It suggests the mill was given up with the monastery, then broken up by the river and by the stripping of materials, and that what remained became a foundation for the artificial island and the weir. One part of a later heritage study dates a modern fish weir to 2014 and the pass itself to 2013. The island is also described as a remade promontory that once ran out from the village into the river. The timbers are the earliest structure for mechanised production yet recovered in the property, and they place milling here under monastic control long before the cotton mills.

At Milford, sheds and warehouses of the 1960s were removed in the early 2020s for housing. The dye house was renovated as commercial rooms. An archaeological survey followed the clearance, and the archaeologist in charge spoke on the findings in September 2024. The published note of that talk does not set out a find list. In 2025 and 2026 a tall stone wall facing the road was repointed, with large brick supports built behind it. A trial-trench evaluation in April 2018 at the former confectionery factory on Derwent Street in Belper, inside the property and the conservation area, found post-medieval and early modern deposits in four of five trenches, mostly brickwork of standard sizes used from about 1840 to 1970 and more likely of the later nineteenth century, with one stratified and two unstratified pieces of modern pottery. The potential for significant buried remains on that plot was judged low.

The mills needed coal, stone, cotton and a way out for yarn. The Erewash Canal, begun in 1777, was meant chiefly for coal, from the Trent at Sawley to Langley Mill, fourteen miles south of Cromford. In 1788 Arkwright asked William Jessop to price a canal from the Cromford mills to Langley Mill. Jessop’s figure was £42,000 and was raised within a couple of weeks. Jedediah Strutt and Thomas Evans opposed the scheme, fearing for the water that drove their own mills. Parliament allowed it in 1789. The Cromford Canal opened in 1794 at nearly twice the estimate. Between Langley Mill and Cromford Wharf it crossed two aqueducts, passed through 3,000 yards, or 2,700 metres, of tunnel under ironworks at Bull Bridge, and dropped through fourteen locks. About three-quarters of the cargo was coal and coke. The rest was gritstone, iron ore and lead. When William Jessop and Benjamin Outram finished the Derby and Nottingham canals in 1796, the mills had a direct water route to both towns.

Benjamin Outram was born at Alfreton on 1 April 1764 and died in London on 22 May 1805, aged forty-one, of what was then called a brain fever. His father Joseph, a land agent, enclosure commissioner and turnpike trustee, was a promoter of the Cromford Canal, and at twenty-four Benjamin became Jessop’s assistant. Cutting the canal, and especially Butterley Tunnel, showed mineral deposits. Francis Beresford bought Butterley Hall and its estate of about 200 acres and leased a moiety to Outram. Benjamin Outram and Company began trading in 1790. The next year Jessop and the Nottingham banker John Wright became partners. The nominal capital was £6,000. Outram was the only partner active in the management, helped by his younger brother Joseph. The works grew to include a limestone quarry, limekilns, collieries and ironstone pits. His first tramway, a little over a mile, carried limestone from Crich to Bullbridge Wharf on the Cromford Canal. He used L-section rails. He became engineer to the Nottingham Canal in 1792 and to the Derby Canal in 1793. The Holmes Aqueduct on the Derby Canal, a single span of 44 feet cast by his company, opened in February 1796 and was one of the first cast-iron aqueducts, a month before a longer iron aqueduct by Thomas Telford. It needed major repairs in 1802, 1812 and 1930, and it was demolished in 1971. After his death, and after litigation, the firm was renamed the Butterley Company in 1807. His son James, born in 1803, later became a general. Outram left no will, and his wife Margaret and the family were for a time close to poverty. The company’s affairs with them were not settled until 1815.

In January 1845 the canal company ordered a permanent pump for dry weather, made by Graham and Company at the Milton Iron Works, Elsecar. The canal did well until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1852 it was sold to the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock and Midlands Junction Railway, which had extended its line south of the canal, and the sale hastened the decline. By 1889 traffic was mostly local. The canal closed in 1944 because repair had become too costly. The county council acquired it in 1974, and a canal society took up restoration.

A canal from the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge to the Cromford Canal was proposed and then dropped as too expensive. Josias Jessop, William Jessop’s son, argued that a wagonway would be cheaper. An Act of 2 May 1825 authorised a railway from Cromford to Whaley Bridge. The backers included William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, Richard Arkwright junior, and several Manchester bankers. The promoters expected steam locomotives, although that technology was still young. George Stephenson was born on 9 June 1781 at Wylam in Northumberland, the second child of Robert and Mabel Stephenson, and he died at noon on 12 August 1848 at Tapton House in Chesterfield. He built his first locomotive, Blücher, in 1814 at Killingworth. His engine Rocket, whose detailed design was his son Robert’s, with a fire-tube boiler suggested by Henry Booth, won the Rainhill Trials in October 1829. The valley account notes that Rocket was not built until 1829, four years after the Act. The southern part of the Cromford and High Peak line, from Cromford Wharf to Hurdlow, opened on 29 May 1830, and the rest to Whaley Bridge on 6 July 1831. The first steam locomotive on this line did not arrive until 1841. Until then the traffic was wagons. The line climbed from 277 feet above the sea at Cromford Wharf to 1,264 feet at Ladmanlow, then fell to 747 feet at the Peak Forest wharves. For a time it had the sharpest curve of any railway in Britain and the steepest incline worked without steam. It cost £180,000 against an estimate of £155,000, far below the £500,000 predicted for a canal. It was never very profitable, because canal traffic was already falling when it opened. An Act of 1855 allowed passengers as well as freight. The line closed on 21 April 1967. Its southern workshops at High Peak Junction stand by the later Derwent Valley railway, on the course of the former Midland line.

The factory system travelled. In 1774 Parliament outlawed the export of tools or utensils used in the cotton and linen trades, so the machines left the country in memory and in stolen plans. Carl Delius, who had worked in England, passed drawings of many of Arkwright’s inventions to Johann Gottfried Brugelmann. Brugelmann’s mill at Ratingen, near Düsseldorf, began production in 1784. He named the settlement Cromford. It was the first Arkwright mill in mainland Europe. In 1790 the United States had fewer than 2,000 spindles, turned by spinning jennies, while Britain had 2.4 million machine spindles.

Samuel Slater was born in Belper on 9 June 1768 and died in Webster, Massachusetts, on 21 April 1835. He was the fifth son of William and Elizabeth Slater, in a farming family of eight. At ten he began work at the cotton mill Jedediah Strutt had opened that year, using the water frame from Cromford. His father died in 1782, and the family indentured him to Strutt. The indentures place the apprenticeship at New Mills in the parish of Duffield, which is present-day Milford, not at New Mills in Cheshire, a confusion found in some older British textbooks. By twenty-one he knew the organisation of the mill. British law forbade the export of the designs. He memorised them and sailed for New York in 1789. Some people in Belper called him Slater the Traitor. In America, Andrew Jackson’s phrase for him was father of the American Industrial Revolution. He was also called the father of the American factory system.

Moses Brown, with William Almy and Smith Brown, had a former fulling mill at Pawtucket Falls on the Blackstone River and, in August 1789, a 32-spindle frame of the Arkwright pattern that they could not run. Slater wrote offering his services and said that if he did not make as good yarn as they made in England, he would have nothing for his work and would throw what he had attempted over the bridge. He signed with Brown in 1790. He found no mechanics able to build the machines until Oziel Wilkinson and his son David made the iron. David Wilkinson said all the turning of that iron was done with hand chisels in lathes turned by cranks. By December the shop was running with ten or twelve workers. In 1793 Slater and Brown opened their first factory at Pawtucket, a mill of 72 spindles under the name Almy, Brown and Slater. Children aged seven to twelve were the first employees, and the first of them were hired in 1790. Slater supervised them himself and brought a Sunday school with him. He later split from Almy and Brown, in 1798 formed a partnership with his father-in-law, and in 1799 was joined by his brother John. At his death he owned thirteen mills and was worth 1.3 million dollars. He had founded the town of Webster in 1832 and named it for Daniel Webster. The original Pawtucket mill still stands.

David Dale was born at Stewarton in Ayrshire on 6 January 1739, a date also given only by his baptism on 14 January 1739, and he died at Rosebank House in Cambuslang on 7 March 1806. In 1784 Richard Arkwright visited Scotland at the request of George Dempster and walked the site of New Lanark with Dempster and Dale. A partnership of the three was agreed. The buildings followed Arkwright’s mills at Cromford. Men and boys were sent to Cromford to be trained. Spinning began early in 1786, and both Dempster and Arkwright then left, so Dale was sole owner. Another account says the 1784 visit identified Lanark as a mill site, that Dale afterwards established four mills, that they were structurally like Masson Mill, and that at least two of them used technology from the Derwent while the factory system itself differed from the valley’s. By the 1790s nearly 1,400 people lived and worked at New Lanark. Village children worked beside about 300 pauper apprentices from the workhouses of Glasgow and Edinburgh, often orphans, unpaid, boarded in No. 4 Mill, from the age of about six or seven until about fifteen. Their hours ran from six in the morning until seven in the evening, with breaks for breakfast and dinner. They had two sets of work clothes and a blue Sunday uniform. Dale provided a day school every day for children under six and an evening school from seven until nine for older children, with more than 500 pupils and sixteen teachers at one stage. Arkwright’s English provision had been a Sunday school. Robert Owen, who married Dale’s daughter Caroline in 1799, bought New Lanark with partners and became sole manager on 1 January 1800. Several historians have said that Owen played down Dale’s work in order to magnify his own. Dale’s raw cotton came from the United States, South America and the West Indies, and it was produced by enslaved labour. In January 1791 he chaired the Glasgow Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and bought shares in the Sierra Leone Company. The valley’s own cotton likewise came from South America, the Caribbean and the southern United States, from plantations that used enslaved African workers, while its silk was imported from Europe. Saltaire, founded in 1853, later repeated the pattern of workers’ housing and shared facilities that Arkwright had set out.

The mills were not saved automatically when cotton left. An Arkwright festival in 1971 led to the Arkwright Society. In 1979 the society bought the Cromford complex from a dyes and paints company and stopped a demolition. Pigments and dyes had contaminated the buildings after cotton spinning ended. With local councils, the East Midlands Development Agency, English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund, the mills were restored and cleaned at a cost of £5 million. By 2019 the society employed 100 people at Cromford, and the restoration expenditure had reached £48 million. Small businesses and teaching now use the site. Masson Mill is a working textile museum and is said to hold the largest collection of bobbins in the world. The Leawood pump house, which still lifts water from the Derwent into the Cromford Canal, opens as a working museum on selected weekends. At Belper, much of the mill site has other business uses, and the North Mill holds a visitor centre with machinery from the valley’s textile trade. Through the 1970s and 1980s local authorities, with English Heritage, tried to slow the decay of houses and mills by advice and grants. When a nomination was prepared in 2000, 26 of the 838 listed buildings were on an at-risk register and in poor repair. The nomination was made so that industrial sites would be better represented among places already inscribed, alongside the Blaenavon industrial landscape, New Lanark and Saltaire. The designation followed in 2001. It was made for two cultural reasons: new buildings were erected here to house the cotton-spinning technology developed by Richard Arkwright, which is taken as the birth of the factory system, and large-scale industry was placed for the first time in a rural landscape, so that housing and other facilities for workers and managers produced the first modern industrial settlements. In June 2009 Bath Street Mill in Derby, an eighteenth-century building inside the property, was damaged by fire. In 2018 a scheme called the Cromford Mills Creative Cluster and World Heritage Site Gateway was a finalist for best major regeneration of a historic building or place.

The same designation is now under pressure. A joint advisory mission visited from 31 January to 2 February 2024. In August 2024 a public account said there was grave concern that development pressure, and a management system unable to safeguard the property, might if left urgent become an ascertained or potential threat, and it compared that risk with the loss of world-heritage status at Liverpool in 2021. The poor condition of the Belper mills was singled out. The mission and the 2025 update both treat the North Mill and the East Mill as an urgent problem. Planning and listed-building applications for their reuse remained live and undetermined. The borough was waiting for a revised scheme, and survey work for an options appraisal was expected early in 2025. The partnership completed an economic study of possible uses, notified on 29 January 2025. That study sets out scenarios and the scale of a conservation deficit. It is not itself an alternative planning application. A scheme of 118 homes at Belper Lane was regretted. Proposals objected to in the August 2024 account include a seventeen-storey block of 202 apartments in Phoenix Street, Derby, about 150 metres from the silk mill, a nineteen-storey block of 400 flats and offices in Bradshaw Way, a scheme at the former Eagle Market for 850 homes with food and leisure uses, and a water-park resort at Crich Quarry called Amber Rock. The Amber Rock application is recorded as refused both on 10 January 2024 and on 10 January 2025 in the same conservation update. The Leonardo Hotel in Derby, formerly Jury’s Inn, was applied for in 2007, permitted in 2008 and built in 2009 inside the buffer, without notification at the time. A proposed extension of the Premier Inn at Full Street was asked not to be approved. Praised works include the museum of making in Derby, the commercial reuse of the Darley Abbey mills, the mixed commercial use of Cromford, and a new library with housing in the old library at Belper. A combined county authority was formed in March 2024, and its mayor was elected in May 2024. A draft design guide for Derby city centre closed its consultation on 13 January 2025. The partnership’s task is to hold the mills, the houses and the river landscape together while those applications are decided.

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