The Birth of Modern Britain by Francis Pryor

Author:Francis Pryor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

I suppose the most overquoted phrase associated with the idea of the Industrial Revolution has to be William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. Laying aside blight to the life of countless sallow-complexioned schoolboys named Mills, it successfully conjures up an image of Hellfire on earth. Certainly many mills (we would more simply refer to them as factories today) were indeed ghastly places in which to spend an entire lifetime, but as most of the early examples also depended on water to run them, their settings could sometimes be spectacular in the extreme.

I have always been a practical, hands-on archaeologist but I have to admit that although I have had an interest in industrial archaeology since my student days back in the 1960s, I nonetheless spent most of my professional life surveying and excavating various prehistoric sites. It wasn’t until I became involved with Channel 4’s Time Team that I was given the opportunity to direct a post-medieval dig. On Time Team one is surrounded by experts who gently dissuade one from making too many obvious mistakes, but I found that reassuring rather than a constraint. Certainly I have enjoyed the process and in a strange way I think my knowledge and experience of earlier archaeology has actually been beneficial. My first industrial site (in 2005) was a textile mill in what is now the heart of modern Manchester. The researchers at Time Team could not have chosen a better site. Shude Mill had originally been built by the great early industrialist Richard Arkwright (1732–92) and had subsequently been burnt down and then bombed during the Second World War. When we started our dig the site had been completely flattened and until our arrival had been used as a car park. Mercifully, it hadn’t been covered in tarmac and just by walking across the compressed rubble one could clearly spot the cobbles and kerbstones of streets. In effect, we had been given a blank canvas with a few intriguing hints of what might lie beneath.

Whenever I take on a prehistoric site I always try to answer one central question: where did the people live? At the Shude Mill site the street (Angel Street) was still there, in use around the edge of the car park, and the demolished houses along it were on the land available to us. I won’t discuss in any detail what we found at the mill site itself as there’s a danger of getting bogged down in the intricacies of beam engine pits and water supplies. But the important point to note is that this mill was built by Arkwright at the very beginning of steam power, when people still didn’t really understand it. I can remember that when the first microcomputers became available some time in the late 1970s we all imagined we would be able to catalogue every object we found, together with their contextual details, and, of course, all the information about layers, levels and so forth. But that proved impossible. The best we could manage was a few rather bare lists which we could then sort in a rather rudimentary fashion.

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