Paradise Mill, Silk Town

Macclesfield is also known as 'Silk Town' owing to the fact it was at one time the world's largest producer of finished silk. We decided to learn more about it by going on a guided tour. Paradise Mill was one of 71 silk factories in the town. It operated right up until September 22nd 1981, when the business went bankrupt and workers walked out, leaving the equipment, goods and materials where they were. Today it is run by a charity and a handful of dedicated enthusiasts who preserve and restore the machines and pass on their knowledge of the industry to people like us.

Our guide Tina packed a whole lot of information into the hour she spent showing us and another couple round the factory floor. Silk cocoons were imported from Italy via London. Each cocoon is made from about 1km of silk thread and the moths inside them were gassed or boiled to stop them munching their way out. There had been some form of silk making as a cottage industry in Macclesfield since the late 1600s, when French Protestant Huguenots sought refuge from religious persecution bringing their silk weaving skills with them.

The town started off making silk buttons and progressed to silk weaving. Women and children were employed in the mills with a few men taking the 'skilled' jobs. Tina didn't skirt round the hardships of the trade, telling us that census data recorded a high rate of deformity among children, mangled, scalped and sometimes dying in accidents while working with the equipment. She ran a few of the machines to show us how loud it could get and said workers would quickly go deaf. They learned Mee-Maw talking; a cross between exaggerated lip movements and mime in order to communicate. Eyesight problems were also widespread, working with such fine threads in low light for hours on end.

We were shown fabric designs drawn on paper using 8x8 grids. Tina then demonstrated the machine where a skilled reader would convert them line by line into holes punched in Jacquard cards. The cards were then strung together and attached to a loom, allowing cylindrical weights attached to the end of hanging threads on the weave to drop through the hole or be lifted en masse . Hand looms were smaller, slower but far more precise, whereas power looms could produce a less intricate pattern relatively quickly.

The mill manufactured small items like ties right the way up to silk parachutes during the war. As well as silk, it wove synthetic materials like crimplene, terylene and rayon. There were hundreds of boxes of fabric left behind and after an enjoyable lunch at The Fountain we returned to the Silk Museum to be shown some of these boxes as they were being sorted, catalogued, cleaned and displayed as part of the Cartwright and Sheldon Archive project using a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. The Jill Brown, the artist and historian in charge was very enthusiastic to share her work with us and Will even spotted a fabric he used to have a tie made out of.

The museum also contained a selection of paintings by local artist Charles Tunnicliffe, the illustrator of Tarka the Otter. Downstairs was an Ancient Egyptian display as well as more local historical artefacts. One woman stopped Vicky to tell her that a new exhibition set up in the corner was based on the lives of her grandparents, with a slideshow of photographs projected onto the wall and an interview with her playing on a loop. It was a nice touch. Vicky had already done too much by this point so we made our way back to Rainboat but we'd definitely recommend a tour of Paradise Mill and a visit to the free museum if you are ever in the area.Read more