The father of town’s industry
“I have built you good roads on earth and a good road to heaven,” boasted Samuel Oldknow, one of the fathers of Stockport’s industrial revolution.
It was true – in addition to his mills and bleachworks, he built a turnpike road from Stockport to Marple and a fine towered church on Marple Ridge.
The legacy of Samuel Oldknow is now a large scale project to uncover his entrepreneurial role in the development of the district.
His Peak Forest Canal at Marple, with its locks and aqueduct, are lasting monuments of this work.
Like his role model, Sir Richard Arkwright, Sam Oldknow started humbly in the retail trade. Oldknow in a draper’s shop, Arkwright as a barber and wigmaker in 18th century Lancashire.
By purloining other men’s ideas Arkwright made himself rich. His real skills were in organising labour into a factory system, massively increasing output.
Oldknow’s slight success in muslin manufacture was encouraged by Arkwright with a £3,000 loan. With this Oldknow set up factories in Stockport, on Hillgate, and later a bleachworks at Heaton Mersey, where some of his worker’s cottages still exist.
His house on Hillgate stands proudly displaying its blue plaque. But his grander house and larger mill at Mellor have both fallen into decay.
In its heyday Mellor Mill was the largest in the world. Oldknow had diverted the River Goyt to form a series of lakes to power his waterwheels, the pits of which have been excavated as part of the Mellor Mill project by Mellor Archaeological Trust.
The mill ponds are now part of Roman Lakes leisure park, where anglers and canoeists enjoy themselves. Water tunnels and those used by his child apprentices to get to work are a source of endless investigation. Why did he need so many tunnels?
Richard Arkwright never put a foot wrong in business and Oldknow tried at Marple to copy Arkwright’s model village at Cromford, his canals, roads, mills and ponds, and often blun- dered. By 1800 he was hopelessly in debt to Arkwright’s son, and when Oldknow died in 1828 he owed £200,000 in an age when a good wage was £100 a year. Now that’s living on credit.
You can still visit Arkwright’s mills at Cromford and see Willersley Castle which he built. But much of Oldknow’s legacy lies buried beneath piles of old bricks, clay and leaves.
If you fancy digging some of it up, Mellor Archaeology are holding a hands-on open day at Mellor Mill site this Sunday, July 19, from 11am to 4pm.
Latest heritage stories in Stockport Heritage Magazine’s summer issue out now at newsagents, bookshops and at stockportheritage magazine.co.uk.