Building the Industrial Revolution. Industrial architecture of the East Midlands. A film for European Architectural Heritage Year - ACE050.3

Arkwright’s first mill building, of plain stone; the Masson Mill at Matlock, with "Venetian embellishments". Carver Mill. A warehouse in Boston, Lincolnshire, built in the 1730s, predating the age of machinery, with timber supports. Streamlined timber frames in a mill. Engraving of a section through Belper North, one of the first fireproof mills in Britain, using iron and brick instead of wood. Interior of the mill. Details of design – wedges on supporting pillars ensure a level floor – a direct antecedent of multi-storey frame buildings in the twentieth century. Weir on the Derwent which considerably increased the power of the water to the Strutts’ mills at Belper. Countryside. Exterior and interiors of Cressbrook Mill, Derbyshire, which, via the Parish Apprentices scheme, employed children from workhouses in Liverpool, Bristol and London. Contract for Sarah Wheeler, a spinning girl at the mill, with her employers, the McConnels, read over. Engraving and animation showing mill workers. Commentary says that the Strutts were the first to formally regulate employees’ working conditions and behaviour. and ruins; engravings. Commentary describes changes in the pattern of work between 1780 and 1830, with employees becoming "extensions of factory machinery". Factory machinery. Commentary points out that the development of steam power meant that factories were no longer tied to rivers and were set up in places with easy access to coal supplies and raw materials. In the nineteenth century, Lancashire and Yorkshire thus took over Derbyshire’s role as the country’s textile centre. Paintings of industrial towns; VO uncomplimentary description by Alexis de Tocqueville of the degradation of their populations. People moved from the country to the cities which often became hugely overcrowded. Engravings and photographs of Nottingham where dwellings were built too close to each other to allow for proper drainage. Commentary reports that Lord Byron tried to shock the House of Lords by describing the city’s squalor.