The Built Environment Transformed. Textile Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

explains in the acknowledgements, the book is largely based on secondary sources, perhaps missing an opportunity to engage and re-engage with primary material. The book contains many photographs, and Vincent helpfully gives OS grid references in many of the captions. There is a map showing sites mentioned at the end of each chapter. Each chapter takes a chronological approach, moving from the scant early evidence into the more abundant early industrial and industrial evidence. The first chapter deals with field patterns and walls. It outlines the major influences on the field patterns, from medieval vaccaries, to late medieval assarts, the growth of the wool trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drainage and enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter draws mostly from secondary material discussing the national and regional picture, but is punctuated with local examples, and this continues throughout the book. This is followed by a short chapter on quarrying, for building stone, stone for firebricks and coal extraction on different scales, from small-scale (‘lazyman’) delphs near where the stone was needed, more sustained and substantial quarries and industrial quarries. The substantial third chapter covers settlement patterns and the dual economy of cloth making and farming. This chapter is one of the stronger ones in the book, and Vincent makes some interesting observations, such as that despite the focus on wool for cloth making, sheep are not a defining feature of the landscape and a lot of wool was brought in from elsewhere. The next chapter contains a detailed discussion of non-conformism in the valley. The fifth chapter covers the connections within and out of the valley, from the Roman archaeological evidence, to packhorse trails (important for the import of wool into the valley), to turnpike and modern roads, canals and railways and local tracks. The final chapter is on the topic of water, significant because of the fourteen reservoirs in the valley (some for the canal, some for general water supply and one built to regulate water supply to mills). The feeder reservoirs for the canals are discussed, along with the tension between mill owners and the canal, development of water supplies to towns and villages, local dam failures and nineteenthand twentiethcentury investments in water supplies. Some sections read more like a catalogue of landscape features than as a discussion of the development of the landscape and the way the book is structured leads to false separation of landscape features from one another e.g. canals are treated separately from water supplies, but this is hard to avoid in a study of this type. By treating each theme chronologically within its own chapter, the book fails to explicitly tease out the relationship between different parts of the landscape. The conclusion started to effectively weave the threads of the landscape discussed in the previous chapters, but disappointingly ends abruptly without drawing out and finishing off those final loose threads. It almost feels like the final page of the book is missing. The book was enjoyable and very readable. Vincent and the members of the Huddersfield Local History Society who have helped bring the book to press should be commended for their hard work on this book. It has a short but sufficient reference list and similar index, which is a useful resource for finding published material relating to the area, and will be a useful starting point for anyone interested in the history of this or surrounding areas, and for anyone attempting a similar exercise in their own local area.