Cromford Mill

node · earth

Arkwright's first water-powered cotton spinning mill, begun in 1771 in the Derwent valley in Derbyshire, and generally described as the first successful mill of its kind anywhere. Its water came not from the Derwent itself but from the Bonsall Brook and from Cromford Sough, a drainage channel out of the local lead mines, which had the useful property of running warm and rarely freezing — an example of one extractive industry's waste product becoming another's power supply. Around the mill Arkwright built housing, a market and a chapel, creating a settlement whose purpose was to hold a workforce beside machinery. The Derwent Valley Mills were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001 as the birthplace of the factory system, and the complex survives as an industrial museum site.