Record · Early modern world · Europe · 1771 · Daily life · Inventions & science

Why did factories appear first in one corner of England?

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Published 2026-09-20 · 8 min read

a tall stone mill building of many small windows beside a millpond — Richard Arkwright's first mill at Cromford, Derbyshire, built in 1771. Humphrey Bolton / CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

TL;DR — Lancashire spinners could not feed faster looms, so local inventors built machines; Arkwright’s Cromford mill of 1771 put them under one roof, and cheap coal spread the model.

Factories appeared first in Lancashire and the Derwent valley because machines built there from 1764 spun cotton faster than hands, and paid off where labor was dear and fuel cheap. After the flying shuttle of 1733 the weavers outran their spinners, and James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton answered with three spinning machines between 1764 and 1779. Arkwright’s needed a water wheel, so in 1771 he built a mill on the River Derwent at Cromford, in Derbyshire, and staffed it with women and children. Steam engines burning cheap coal then freed the mills from the rivers, and by the early 1800s cotton was Britain’s major import and export. The economic historian Robert C. Allen argued that the machines were built and bought in Britain because British wages were high and British coal was cheap.

Quick facts

When: 1733 (flying shuttle) · 1764 (spinning jenny) · 1769 (water frame patent; Watt's separate condenser) · 1771 (Cromford mill) · 1779 (spinning mule) · 1785 (power loom) · 1832 (Sadler committee) · 1833 (Factory Act)
Where: Lancashire in northwest England, where the spinning machines were built and the steam mills later rose; Cromford on the River Derwent in Derbyshire, upstream from Derby, where the first water-powered cotton mill ran
Who: John Kay of the flying shuttle; James Hargreaves; Richard Arkwright and the clockmaker John Kay; Samuel Crompton; Edmund Cartwright; the economic historian Robert C. Allen; the witnesses Elizabeth Bentley and Matthew Crabtree
Outcome: Spinning machines that paid off where labor was dear and fuel cheap put cotton under one roof at Cromford in 1771; steam then moved the mills to the coalfields, and by the early 1800s cotton was Britain's major import and export

The problem: looms outran the spinners

Before 1760 cloth was made in cottages: raw cotton was carded into a loose roving, a spinner drew it out and twisted it on a wheel, and a weaver passed the weft through the warp on a hand loom. In 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which sped up the weaver’s work. A spinning wheel still made one thread at a time, and the weavers ran short of yarn.

Hand-spun cotton was also strong enough only for the weft, according to the Cromford Mills site, so English “cotton” cloth had a warp of linen, wool or silk. Buyers wanted pure cotton because it washed and printed better, and Arkwright spent years experimenting in Lancashire to find a stronger thread.

Four machines in 21 years

Hargreaves built the spinning jenny in Lancashire in 1764, took until 1767 to make a design that worked, and patented it in 1770; the patent was voided because he had sold jennies before it was issued. Allen described the jenny as little more than a spinning wheel on its side, with several spindles driven by belts from one wheel. By 1790 there were about 20,000 jennies in England.

Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, spun with rollers instead of fingers and made a thread strong enough for warp. The Science Museum Group’s prototype of 1769 names its makers as John Kay and Richard Arkwright; this Kay was a clockmaker, not the man of the shuttle. The Cromford Mills site dates a first patent to 1768. Crompton’s mule, built at Bolton between 1772 and 1779, combined jenny and water frame. The power loom came last. Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman, wrote that at Matlock in 1784 some Manchester men told him that once Arkwright’s patent expired “hands never could be found to weave” all the yarn, and that he patented his loom on April 4, 1785; Richard Guest printed the account in 1823.

a wooden spinning jenny with a row of spindles and a large hand wheel — A spinning jenny on display at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum, Lancashire. Clem Rutter, Rochester, Kent / CC BY 3.0. Source

Cromford, 1771: what a factory was

In 1771 Arkwright built a water-powered spinning mill at Cromford on the River Derwent, and a second, larger one in 1776 to 1777; UNESCO’s listing of the valley dates the “Arkwright System” to these two buildings.

The Cromford Mills site explains what was new: a mill had housed a handful of workers and one powered process, but here hundreds tended a sequence of powered machines that turned loose fiber into finished yarn, and the word “factory” was not yet common. Local lead mines had reached the water table, and the miners’ wives and children were, in the site’s words, “free to provide a cheap labour force for Arkwright.” In 1771 the mill offered paid work to children of seven: 13-hour days, six days a week. The model was copied across northern England, the United States and Germany.

Coal and steam: why the mills left the rivers

Thomas Newcomen’s engine at Dudley Castle, erected in 1712, pumped water out of a coal mine, and James Watt later improved the design. Allen noted that the steam engine was invented to drain coal mines and burned coal, and that most of the coal mined in Europe in the 18th century came from Britain.

Guest counted 14 steam-loom factories with about 2,000 looms around Manchester and Stockport in 1818 and 32 factories with 5,732 looms in 1821, and described “vast brick edifices” of 70 or 80 feet in the south of Lancashire that did the work of whole villages.

Who worked the machines

Joyce Burnette, an economic historian writing for EH.net, records that women worked the jenny and the water frame while mule spinning stayed male. A return by James Mitchell to the factory commissioners in 1834, covering 82 cotton factories, found 58 percent of the workers female. At the three Arkwright mills in 1800, 700 of 1,150 workers, 61 percent, were classed as children, according to the Cromford Mills site. Parliament’s history counts some 20,000 apprentices, many of them orphans under ten, in cotton mills in 1800.

In 1832 a Commons committee under Michael Sadler took evidence from the workers. Elizabeth Bentley, 23, said she had started in a Leeds flax mill at six, working from five in the morning to nine at night when trade was busy; asked what happened if she flagged, she said, “Strap us.” Matthew Crabtree, who began at eight, described 14-hour days and said of lateness, “I was most commonly beaten.” The questions were leading, as the 1930 editors of the printed evidence observed; the answers were printed in Parliamentary Papers for 1831 to 1832, and the Factory Act of 1833 barred children under nine and limited those aged nine to 13 to eight hours a day. Objections were older: a petition of Leeds woollen workers in 1786 said scribbling machines had “thrown thousands of your petitioners out of employ,” and the town’s cloth merchants answered in 1791 that cotton’s “amazing Success” had come by machinery.

Why Britain, and why Lancashire

Allen’s argument runs on two prices. In his book of 2009 he wrote that British wages were high and British energy cheap by any international standard, so the industrial revolution was “uniquely profitable” there. Where wages were low a machine saved little; where coal was cheap an engine cost less to run than men. In an earlier paper he set his case against explanations that credited luck, British genius, culture or the rise of science: it was not Newtonian science that inclined British inventors to seek machines that raised labor productivity, he wrote, but the rising cost of labor. He offered one test. In 1771 John Holker, an English Jacobite who had become France’s inspector of foreign manufactures, sent his son to Lancashire, and the son brought back a jenny; the French state subsidized its use, yet in 1790 France had about 900 jennies against 20,000 in England.

Lancashire had the skills as well. Allen recorded that Arkwright employed clockmakers over a five-year period to perfect the water frame, and that its rollers and gears were built as a module known as the “clock work” after the apparatus that inspired it. The Science Museum Group’s prototype names the clockmaker John Kay as its co-maker. Britain imported 18 million pounds of raw cotton in 1786, against 11 million for France.

The machines were built where yarn was short and mechanics were plentiful, the first factory rose where a river could turn the frames, and the mills multiplied where coal was cheap enough to burn.

Key facts

John Kay’s flying shuttle of 1733 sped up weaving; a spinning wheel still made one thread.
Hargreaves’s jenny (Lancashire, 1764; patent 1770) drove several spindles from one wheel; about 20,000 were in use in England by 1790, against 900 in France.
Arkwright’s water frame was patented in 1769; the Science Museum Group holds the 1769 prototype made with the clockmaker John Kay, and the Cromford Mills site dates a first patent to 1768.
Arkwright’s Cromford mill of 1771 and second mill of 1776 to 1777 are the “Arkwright System” in UNESCO’s Derwent Valley Mills listing of 2001.
In 1800 the three Arkwright mills employed 1,150 workers, 700 of them classed as children (Cromford Mills).
Most of the coal mined in Europe in the 18th century came from Britain; Newcomen’s engine of 1712 at Dudley Castle was built to drain a coal mine.
The 1833 Factory Act barred children under nine and limited those aged nine to 13 to eight hours a day.

FAQ

Where was the first cotton factory?

Arkwright's water-powered spinning mill at Cromford on the River Derwent in Derbyshire, built in 1771. The Cromford Mills site calls it the first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill, and UNESCO listed the valley in 2001.

Why did the spinning machines come from Lancashire?

Hargreaves built the jenny there in 1764, and Arkwright experimented for years in Lancashire before his water frame was built with the clockmaker John Kay. Allen argued that British wages were high and coal cheap, so machines that saved labor paid off in Britain and nowhere else, and he recorded that Arkwright employed clockmakers for five years to make the water frame work.

Who worked in the early mills?

Women and children. Women ran the jenny and water frame; a return of 1834 found 58 percent of cotton factory workers were female, and at the Arkwright mills in 1800, 61 percent were classed as children. Witnesses told the Sadler committee in 1832 of 14-hour days from the age of six or eight.

Sources

The whole world at about the same time: The world in AD 1750

Cite this article

APA: Song Letter. (2026, September 20). Why did factories appear first in one corner of England? Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/early-modern/industrial-revolution-lancashire-cotton-why-there/
Chicago: Song Letter. “Why did factories appear first in one corner of England?” Our Earth's History, September 20, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/early-modern/industrial-revolution-lancashire-cotton-why-there/.
MLA: Song Letter. “Why did factories appear first in one corner of England?” Our Earth's History, 20 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/europe/early-modern/industrial-revolution-lancashire-cotton-why-there/.

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