ABC Wednesday - Centenary

 The city of Preston at one time had 64 cotton mills and Centenary Mill was one of them.  The power house chimney

 today is a city landmark.  Centenary Mill was built by the Horrockses Company in 1891 to mark 100 years of its cotton manufacture in Preston (where they had originally started in the Yellow Factory).  In the second half of the 19th Century takeovers and mergers instigated the construction of enormous spinning mills and this was one of four monumental giants erected in the final years.  Horrockses had merged with companies of Crewdson and Hollins to become the Horrockses and Crewdson Company  Could my pocket camera get the building into one photograph?

 

 Well I managed to get the side entrance and a portion of the building so I tried again

 and just squeezed it in while cutting off the top of the tower. Outwardly the brick façade is in the style of the day, inwardly there was a revolutionary steel frame, allowing greater weight to be supported inside and permitting large and numerous window.

 In 1981 Courtaulds Textiles closed their mill and Horrockses moved work from Centenary Mill to the Courtaulds site. In 1986 Centenary Mill was taken over for blue jean manufacture and 50% of UK jean manufacturing was done here employing 3000.  That finished and  it was used as warehousing eventually it lay empty until in recent years the building was converted into apartments.

Horrockses was a vast enterprise but its founder John Horrocks was a small spinner who by building a mill was one of the pioneers of the Lancashire 'factory system' by which the cotton industry was revolutionised.  The company used the slogan "The Greatest Name in Cotton" and at the time the Centenary Mill was built they were expanding their business both at home and abroad. Labels were tailor made for each different market, they were rarely understated....

An entry to the ABC Wednesday meme, a journey  from A to Z