If you have a spare 90 mins, I'd really recommend watching this programme about this history of cotton and textiles: 'All Our Working Lives'. The first hour is a replay of the original 1980s episode, with the last 30 mins being an update of the years since.
Beware: it's remarkably moving. The footage of the men smashing up the unwanted weaving machines was almost too hard to watch...but then, as the daughter of a Lancashire man, it was always going to feel close to home for me...
It's astonishing to think some 700 miles of yarn were produced weekly at each mill back in the day: and all these mills were concentrated in a few square miles around the NW of England.
(For those of you not able to watch it, I'll watch it again with a notepad and pencil and write it up here in due course...watch this space please..!)
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