The British Empire at its peak was the largest in the history of the world, and the cornerstone of the Empire was foreign trade. Empire and trade fed off each other, as new colonies made available new resources and markets for British factories, and by the late 19th century Britain had an estimated quarter of all world trade. The prodigious production levels needed to fuel this trade were made possible by the new systems and technologies of the Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As the first major nation to industrialize and use these new production systems, Britain gained a tremendous advantage in advancing both its Imperial and its commercial interests. In the process, many of its cities were changed irrevocably and sometimes unrecognizably, with vast demographic shifts and even topographical changes as canals were dug, rivers were shifted, or hills were mined.
Some of the cities most affected by the Industrial Revolution were those that became the industrial giants of Northern England in the 19th century, such as Sheffield, Manchester, Bradford, or Nottingham. However, despite its apparently disruptive effects on these urban centers, the Industrial Revolution was not wholly an external phenomenon that happened to them, nor a fundamental disruption of their existing order. Rather, it was a period of highly accelerated development, and its seeds had been sown centuries earlier as individual cities like these had began to specialize in certain industries and to export manufactured goods to mainland Europe or to other parts of Britain. Though seemingly sudden and even cataclysmic because of the allometric processes of industrial and urban growth, the Industrial Revolution actually flowed naturally out of the evolving systems of production that these cities had been developing over the course of centuries.
Cities like Sheffield, for example, which had long been famous for its knives and tableware, had developed a craft-oriented economy that passed knowledge and techniques from one generation to the next, slowly developing technologies and mass-production capabilities while maintaining links to resources like coal, iron ore, and distribution networks. Bradford, which in the 18th and 19th centuries became a phenomenon of urban and industrial expansion in the wool trades, had already been processing wool and textiles almost from the time of William the Conqueror. Through its long history this city had likewise honed its production methods, established channels for supplying itself with raw materials, and worked to develop markets for its products. It was the pre-existing industrial economies in cities like these that brought forth the inventors, technologies, transportation networks, and entrepreneurs that made the Industrial Revolution possible and even inevitable.
And what had sustained the early industrial economies of Northern England’s cities in prior centuries? In almost every case, it was rivers that had played the most vital roles—powering mills, transporting goods, and providing the water needed for industry. Centuries before steam power, it was their locations on waterways that allowed towns like Bradford (on the Bradford Beck), Sheffield (on the River Sheaf and Porter Brook), Manchester (on the River Medlock, River Irk, River Irwell, and the Gore Brook), or Birmingham (on the River Rea and the River Tame) to thrive and in some cases to even develop economies based on production of specific goods using water-powered, mechanized processes. These and many other river-rich towns in Northern England were ideal incubators of industrialism, and the success of that incubation was demonstrated by their explosive growth and economic success in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Successful cities build over their history, and these cities, which changed so radically in size and character during the course of the Industrial Revolution, did so in particularly obvious ways. In each of the cities mentioned above, all but the largest of the rivers are now underground. The Bradford Beck, the Sheaf, Porter Brook, the Medlock, Gore Brook, and the Irk—all of these waterways were at one time vital to the development of the cities through which they flow, and each is now partially or completely culverted within their respective cities. In cities throughout England, and particularly Northern England, similar sites exist. London, for example, has over a dozen named watercourses that were once significant to the developing city but that now are integrated into the sewer system and completely invisible from the surface.
Though underground, and usually unseen, the changed role of these watercourses does not mean that they no longer offer insight into the cities they run through. On the contrary, they can offer a connection to the early days of a city, because often the small, polluted urban waterways that are likely to be culverted in a large city are the same small and centrally-located streams that would have been most useful to the early settlement that was the predecessor of the city. Moreover, the process by which a river was culverted or integrated into a sewer system not only tells about that particular period in the city’s history, but it also strongly reflects changes and developments the city underwent between the time that the watercourse was a useful resource above-ground, and when it was relegated to the underground. The growth of Sheffield from a small village of artisanal knife-makers to a water-powered metalworking town, for example, was reflected in the Porter Brook’s complete diversion into a series of millraces and millponds by the 18th century, and Sheffield’s shift away from water-power and its continued growth in the 19th century is reflected in the culvert, which functions as a city storm drain, that encloses the Porter Brook today.
On a recent trip to England, I set out to find some of these disappeared watercourses and to see what they could tell me about the history of the cities under which they now ran. In cold November weather, I took off from London with two companions: Chris, an Australian computer programmer and photographer, and John, a Londoner who divides his time between his work as an arborist and his hobby of researching London’s sewers. We had three goals: Nottingham, to find the remnants of a small stream once known as the Beck Burn; Sheffield, to find the River Sheaf; and Bradford, for the Bradford Beck. John woke us up at five o’clock a.m., and Chris and I piled into his little two-door sports car amidst piles of rubber boots, helmets, winter jackets, tripods, cameras, and headlamps.
NOTTINGHAM: NOTTINGHAM BACKGROUND AND THE BECK BURN
The first stop was Nottingham, where our goal was to walk underground through the 19th-century Beck Valley Storm Water Culvert, a drainage tunnel that follows the old course of a stream called the Beck or the Beck Burn. It was the smallest of the watercourses we would visit, but I was still excited to see a stream from which Robin Hood himself might have drunk. If the locals knew we were walking through their city’s drains, I wondered, stealing from Nottingham’s rich past to share with the present, would they consider us heroes or thieves?
In Robin Hood’s time—around the 13th century AD—and for centuries after, the Beck had been a clear and sparkling brook that ran through Sneinton, an area of pastures and fields just east of Nottingham’s gates. Unlike the eponymous watercourses we would later visit in Sheffield and Bradford (the River Sheaf and the Bradford Beck), the Beck Burn was never central to Nottingham and probably was not used to drive waterwheels for power. Up until about the 17th century, it was literally peripheral, running just outside of Nottingham’s eastern edge and flowing south into the River Leen, which was effectively the town’s southern border.
Rather, its importance as an incubator of urban development lay in its value as one of several watercourses that richly supplied the region with irrigation, washing water, and drinking water for people and livestock. The springs that supplied it were on the north side of town, and with the Leen on the south this gave the town freshwater sources on three sides. Charles Deering, an historian of the town who lived and wrote in the 18th century, pointed out that the Beck Burn was invaluable as a source of water for the luxuriant corn and hay fields to the north, as well as the cattle pastured both north and east of the town. After enumerating the other advantages of the site—the navigable Trent River less than a mile to the south, and the closeness of the famous Sherwood forest—Deering asks rhetorically: “Thus were a Naturalist in Quest of an exquisite Spot to built a Town or City upon, could he meet with one that would better Answer his Wishes?”
The Beck’s primary source was St. Ann’s Well, a spring that was located north of town at the end of what is now St. Ann’s Well Road. Another unnamed spring fed into the stream between St. Ann’s Well and the town. The stream originally flowed into the Leen River, which in turn flowed into the larger Trent River. The Trent River, as well as the Nottingham Canal of the late 18th century, provided transport routes that helped Nottingham develop into the central market town of the region. The Trent is not much changed from its old course, but the Leen disappeared when its water was redirected into the canal. The Beck Valley Culvert now flows directly into the Trent, well south of the town’s boundaries in the middle ages.
In Robin Hood’s time—around the 13th century AD—and for centuries after, the Beck had been a clear and sparkling brook that ran through Sneinton, an area of pastures and fields just east of Nottingham’s gates. Unlike the eponymous watercourses we would later visit in Sheffield and Bradford (the River Sheaf and the Bradford Beck), the Beck Burn was never central to Nottingham and probably was not used to drive waterwheels for power. Up until about the 17th century, it was literally peripheral, running just outside of Nottingham’s eastern edge and flowing south into the River Leen, which was effectively the town’s southern border.
Rather, its importance as an incubator of urban development lay in its value as one of several watercourses that richly supplied the region with irrigation, washing water, and drinking water for people and livestock. The springs that supplied it were on the north side of town, and with the Leen on the south this gave the town freshwater sources on three sides. Charles Deering, an historian of the town who lived and wrote in the 18th century, pointed out that the Beck Burn was invaluable as a source of water for the luxuriant corn and hay fields to the north, as well as the cattle pastured both north and east of the town. After enumerating the other advantages of the site—the navigable Trent River less than a mile to the south, and the closeness of the famous Sherwood forest—Deering asks rhetorically: “Thus were a Naturalist in Quest of an exquisite Spot to built a Town or City upon, could he meet with one that would better Answer his Wishes?”
The Beck’s primary source was St. Ann’s Well, a spring that was located north of town at the end of what is now St. Ann’s Well Road. Another unnamed spring fed into the stream between St. Ann’s Well and the town. The stream originally flowed into the Leen River, which in turn flowed into the larger Trent River. The Trent River, as well as the Nottingham Canal of the late 18th century, provided transport routes that helped Nottingham develop into the central market town of the region. The Trent is not much changed from its old course, but the Leen disappeared when its water was redirected into the canal. The Beck Valley Culvert now flows directly into the Trent, well south of the town’s boundaries in the middle ages.
NOTTINGHAM: INTO THE BECK
Comparing 19th-century maps with contemporary ones, we found the outfall of the culvert along the northern shore of the Trent River. We let ourselves down the bank and into the river, and stepped into the twelve-foot-wide, eight-foot high brick tunnel.
The sunlight disappeared almost instantly as we waded in. The water was waist deep; it was cold and dirty, and I was very glad to be wearing chest-high waders. Chris and John were only wearing hip waders and they tried to keep to the curving, shallower sides of the channel. I stayed in the center where the water was higher, but the flat bottom gave a better footing. I jumped and almost fell when I felt something moving touch my leg. Chris saw me. “Fish,” he said. “They’ve been bumping into my legs. Is that what you felt?”
A stone plaque above the intricate brickwork of the outfall had told us it had been built in 1884, and gave us Nottingham’s Latin motto—“Vivit Post Funera Virtus,” or “Virtue Outlives Death.” The tunnel had been built with care and pride, and a measure of that is the fact that the grade is still even, with no sinkage or buckling of the floor. As the tunnel slowly sloped upward, the water became shallower, until it was just an ankle-high fast-moving stream coursing down the center of the tunnel. Occasionally, we passed openings to smaller brick tunnels. From its inception, the culvert had been intended to carry storm water—but as with almost all older storm water drains, it would also carry any overflow from the sewage system. The lower half of the tunnel openings we passed were blocked with a dam. As long as the sewage didn’t rise above the dam it stayed out of the culvert, but if it rose too high then the excess would flow over the barrier and into this tunnel.
After about a half-mile of walking, the tunnel turned perfectly round, a brick tube maybe twelve feet in diameter, which would slowly shrink as we went further upstream. Dark, glassy bricks lined the bottom third of the tunnel to resist the punishing flow of water. Higher up, the bricks were lighter in color and looked much more like standard building bricks. All of the brickwork was still immaculate, despite being over a century old. The vitreous bricks underfoot were wet and incredibly slippery, and I fell once with a noise that echoed through the tunnel.
The sunlight disappeared almost instantly as we waded in. The water was waist deep; it was cold and dirty, and I was very glad to be wearing chest-high waders. Chris and John were only wearing hip waders and they tried to keep to the curving, shallower sides of the channel. I stayed in the center where the water was higher, but the flat bottom gave a better footing. I jumped and almost fell when I felt something moving touch my leg. Chris saw me. “Fish,” he said. “They’ve been bumping into my legs. Is that what you felt?”
A stone plaque above the intricate brickwork of the outfall had told us it had been built in 1884, and gave us Nottingham’s Latin motto—“Vivit Post Funera Virtus,” or “Virtue Outlives Death.” The tunnel had been built with care and pride, and a measure of that is the fact that the grade is still even, with no sinkage or buckling of the floor. As the tunnel slowly sloped upward, the water became shallower, until it was just an ankle-high fast-moving stream coursing down the center of the tunnel. Occasionally, we passed openings to smaller brick tunnels. From its inception, the culvert had been intended to carry storm water—but as with almost all older storm water drains, it would also carry any overflow from the sewage system. The lower half of the tunnel openings we passed were blocked with a dam. As long as the sewage didn’t rise above the dam it stayed out of the culvert, but if it rose too high then the excess would flow over the barrier and into this tunnel.
After about a half-mile of walking, the tunnel turned perfectly round, a brick tube maybe twelve feet in diameter, which would slowly shrink as we went further upstream. Dark, glassy bricks lined the bottom third of the tunnel to resist the punishing flow of water. Higher up, the bricks were lighter in color and looked much more like standard building bricks. All of the brickwork was still immaculate, despite being over a century old. The vitreous bricks underfoot were wet and incredibly slippery, and I fell once with a noise that echoed through the tunnel.
NOTTINGHAM: ST. ANN’S WELL AND SEWERAGE
St. Ann’s Well itself was a much-loved site. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was about a mile from the town limits, which helped the water stay clean. Writing in 1641, a local historian described it:
This Well is all Summer long much frequented, and there are but few fair Days between March and October, in which some Company or other of the Town….use not to fetch a walk to this Well, either to dine or sup, or both…. and when any of the Town have their Friends come to them, they have given them no welcome, unless they entertain them at this Well.
By the 18th century, the spring was protected by a hut with stone walls and a tiled roof. Though it was officially named after a nearby chapel dedicated to St. Ann, the well was also known as Robin Hood’s Well. The Public House next to the well had its own attractions for fans of the famous outlaw: “Robin Hood’s Chair,” a battered wicker chair that visitors could sit in, along with a hat and a bow that the owners of the Public House “affirm[ed] to have been the famous Robber’s Property.”
Though St. Ann’s Well was a well-loved attraction, the stream from it became more and more polluted with sewage as the city grew. Records show that the city had maintained the Beck’s channel as far back as the 15th century, hiring laborers at three pennies a day to clean out the refuse that collected in the ditch. After nearly four centuries of maintaining it this way, it was roofed over for the first time sometime between 1833 and 1872. But heavy rain could cause the small ditch to back up and flood the road next to it, and the undrained sewage exacerbated the repeated outbreaks of cholera in the 19th century.
In 1872, a Sewerage Board was created to deal with the sanitation issues plaguing the city. “As various sewers in the area were at that time discharging their contents direct into these rivers and other water-courses,” explained one of Nottingham’s city engineers, “the necessity for the formation of the Board will be readily understood.” Among their tasks was to build a new, larger culvert for the Beck.
It was this 19th century culvert through which we walked now. The engineers had done their job well. Though the final years of the 19th century were still plagued by terrible labor conditions and disease outbreaks throughout Northern England’s industrial towns, urban sewerage and water supply engineering like this tunnel were the foundation of a hugely important fifty-year decline in mortality rates, which had begun with the passage of England’s first Public Health Act in 1848. By effectively draining sewage from Nottingham, this tunnel we were in had, without any exaggeration, saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost to water-borne diseases. Virtue outlives death, indeed.
We didn’t get all the way to the original St. Ann’s Well. The tunnel shrank until we had to walk in a crouch, and then shrank more until we had to crawl. I think we were about a half-mile from the original source when we were forced to turn around.
Looking at surface maps and tracing our route, we found that we had walked and waded for about two miles through the tunnel. Originally the entire stream hadn’t been over a mile and a half long, but re-routing the outfall to the Trent when the Leen was diverted had almost doubled the length of the Beck Burn.
We came out of the tunnel in the middle of Nottingham, through a rusty hatchway in the sidewalk between a busy roadway and a church that had been (accidentally) constructed over the culvert tunnel in the late 1890s. Somehow the church architects had forgotten about the Beck Burn’s tunnel (even though the Beck Burn’s nearness was the reason, in 1833, that the church had purchased the site as an additional graveyard for Cholera victims). An emergency system of iron braces—essentially a cage around the tunnel—was laid into the ground to support the weight of the stone church over the stream’s culvert.
I thought the Church’s construction stood as a good example of why it’s important for a city to remember what lies beneath the surface. But as we crawled out of the ground, wet and dirty as we emerged next to a busy road, the utterly baffled looks we got from the people who saw us suggested that few, if any, knew they were passing over one of the once-pellucid streams that had nurtured the town in its very earliest days.
This Well is all Summer long much frequented, and there are but few fair Days between March and October, in which some Company or other of the Town….use not to fetch a walk to this Well, either to dine or sup, or both…. and when any of the Town have their Friends come to them, they have given them no welcome, unless they entertain them at this Well.
By the 18th century, the spring was protected by a hut with stone walls and a tiled roof. Though it was officially named after a nearby chapel dedicated to St. Ann, the well was also known as Robin Hood’s Well. The Public House next to the well had its own attractions for fans of the famous outlaw: “Robin Hood’s Chair,” a battered wicker chair that visitors could sit in, along with a hat and a bow that the owners of the Public House “affirm[ed] to have been the famous Robber’s Property.”
Though St. Ann’s Well was a well-loved attraction, the stream from it became more and more polluted with sewage as the city grew. Records show that the city had maintained the Beck’s channel as far back as the 15th century, hiring laborers at three pennies a day to clean out the refuse that collected in the ditch. After nearly four centuries of maintaining it this way, it was roofed over for the first time sometime between 1833 and 1872. But heavy rain could cause the small ditch to back up and flood the road next to it, and the undrained sewage exacerbated the repeated outbreaks of cholera in the 19th century.
In 1872, a Sewerage Board was created to deal with the sanitation issues plaguing the city. “As various sewers in the area were at that time discharging their contents direct into these rivers and other water-courses,” explained one of Nottingham’s city engineers, “the necessity for the formation of the Board will be readily understood.” Among their tasks was to build a new, larger culvert for the Beck.
It was this 19th century culvert through which we walked now. The engineers had done their job well. Though the final years of the 19th century were still plagued by terrible labor conditions and disease outbreaks throughout Northern England’s industrial towns, urban sewerage and water supply engineering like this tunnel were the foundation of a hugely important fifty-year decline in mortality rates, which had begun with the passage of England’s first Public Health Act in 1848. By effectively draining sewage from Nottingham, this tunnel we were in had, without any exaggeration, saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost to water-borne diseases. Virtue outlives death, indeed.
We didn’t get all the way to the original St. Ann’s Well. The tunnel shrank until we had to walk in a crouch, and then shrank more until we had to crawl. I think we were about a half-mile from the original source when we were forced to turn around.
Looking at surface maps and tracing our route, we found that we had walked and waded for about two miles through the tunnel. Originally the entire stream hadn’t been over a mile and a half long, but re-routing the outfall to the Trent when the Leen was diverted had almost doubled the length of the Beck Burn.
We came out of the tunnel in the middle of Nottingham, through a rusty hatchway in the sidewalk between a busy roadway and a church that had been (accidentally) constructed over the culvert tunnel in the late 1890s. Somehow the church architects had forgotten about the Beck Burn’s tunnel (even though the Beck Burn’s nearness was the reason, in 1833, that the church had purchased the site as an additional graveyard for Cholera victims). An emergency system of iron braces—essentially a cage around the tunnel—was laid into the ground to support the weight of the stone church over the stream’s culvert.
I thought the Church’s construction stood as a good example of why it’s important for a city to remember what lies beneath the surface. But as we crawled out of the ground, wet and dirty as we emerged next to a busy road, the utterly baffled looks we got from the people who saw us suggested that few, if any, knew they were passing over one of the once-pellucid streams that had nurtured the town in its very earliest days.
SHEFFIELD: BACKGROUND
In Sheffield, we visited the River Sheaf, which runs underground beneath the city center in a series of 19th-century stone culverts. Sheffield was founded at the confluence of the Sheaf and the larger River Don, and it was a world center of metallurgy, steel production, cutlery, and armaments well into the 20th century.
The city’s metalworking industry developed the two most important processes behind the modern steel industry: the “crucible steel” process in 1740, and the Bessemer Converter in 1856. Stainless steel was invented here in 1912. The city manufactured decorative metalwork and household wares as well, especially after a Sheffield cutler invented an early method of silver-plating (“Sheffield Plate”) in 1742.
When visiting the town in 1762, the writer Daniel Defoe wrote:
This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work: Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes, & and nails….
These knives had been the core of the city’s production since the Middle Ages, and had made Sheffield famous throughout England and the world. In the 14th-century Canterbury Tales, one of the characters in the Reeve’s Tale carries a “Sheffeld thwitel,” or knife. Sir Walter Scott lived four centuries later, but he set his novel Ivanhoe in the 12th century and the first character in the book carries “…one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edged knives, with a buck’s-hoon handle, which were fabricated in the neighborhood, and bore even at this early period the name of a Sheffield whittle.” Sheffield knives came the U.S. as well. (As did the word “whittle,” now used as a verb.) The humble Barlow knife, oft considered an American classic, was invented in Sheffield by Obadiah Barlow in 1670. Bowie knives were invented by the American Colonel Jim Bowie—but within a few years of his invention, Sheffield was producing most of the Bowie knives sold in America.
The River Sheaf and its smaller neighboring streams provided the power behind this long tradition of metalsmithing. Neither the Sheaf nor the Don were big enough to navigate with a cargo-carrying boat of any large size (although smaller boats on the Don provided vital transportation of raw materials for the knifemakers), but the Sheaf was fast-flowing, with steep grades that could drive waterwheels. Smaller tributaries of the Sheaf flowed equally swiftly, and small water-powered mills were built in the area as early as the 12th century. In the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution (and for many years after), waterwheels moved bellows, powered forge hammers, and drove the machines that rolled and cut metal for these knives and tools.
Most importantly for Sheffield’s development, water was able to power grinding mills, which was a necessity for any serious cutlery manufacturing. (Cutlery includes edged weapons and tools like hoes, shovels, and axes as well as knives and tableware.) Without waterpower from the Sheaf or Porter Brook, Sheffield could not have developed the early industries and technologies that allowed the city to become a leader in the industrial production of metal products into the modern age.
To get into the tunnel of the Sheaf, we followed the old course of the Porter Brook, which had once been a long and winding stream that flowed from across the city to merge with the Sheaf. The little stream had been altered almost beyond recognition, however, by mills seeking to use its water for power in the 18th century. Millraces had re-channeled the water into a series of millponds that only vaguely followed the Brook’s original path. Now the remnants of the stream—an ankle-high trickle—flows through concrete troughs and into its own tunnel, and then merges with the Sheaf underground. John, Chris and I followed the water until we came to the concrete mouth of the Porter’s culvert. Turning on headlamps and tugging up our waders, we plunged into the darkness.
The city’s metalworking industry developed the two most important processes behind the modern steel industry: the “crucible steel” process in 1740, and the Bessemer Converter in 1856. Stainless steel was invented here in 1912. The city manufactured decorative metalwork and household wares as well, especially after a Sheffield cutler invented an early method of silver-plating (“Sheffield Plate”) in 1742.
When visiting the town in 1762, the writer Daniel Defoe wrote:
This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work: Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes, & and nails….
These knives had been the core of the city’s production since the Middle Ages, and had made Sheffield famous throughout England and the world. In the 14th-century Canterbury Tales, one of the characters in the Reeve’s Tale carries a “Sheffeld thwitel,” or knife. Sir Walter Scott lived four centuries later, but he set his novel Ivanhoe in the 12th century and the first character in the book carries “…one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edged knives, with a buck’s-hoon handle, which were fabricated in the neighborhood, and bore even at this early period the name of a Sheffield whittle.” Sheffield knives came the U.S. as well. (As did the word “whittle,” now used as a verb.) The humble Barlow knife, oft considered an American classic, was invented in Sheffield by Obadiah Barlow in 1670. Bowie knives were invented by the American Colonel Jim Bowie—but within a few years of his invention, Sheffield was producing most of the Bowie knives sold in America.
The River Sheaf and its smaller neighboring streams provided the power behind this long tradition of metalsmithing. Neither the Sheaf nor the Don were big enough to navigate with a cargo-carrying boat of any large size (although smaller boats on the Don provided vital transportation of raw materials for the knifemakers), but the Sheaf was fast-flowing, with steep grades that could drive waterwheels. Smaller tributaries of the Sheaf flowed equally swiftly, and small water-powered mills were built in the area as early as the 12th century. In the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution (and for many years after), waterwheels moved bellows, powered forge hammers, and drove the machines that rolled and cut metal for these knives and tools.
Most importantly for Sheffield’s development, water was able to power grinding mills, which was a necessity for any serious cutlery manufacturing. (Cutlery includes edged weapons and tools like hoes, shovels, and axes as well as knives and tableware.) Without waterpower from the Sheaf or Porter Brook, Sheffield could not have developed the early industries and technologies that allowed the city to become a leader in the industrial production of metal products into the modern age.
To get into the tunnel of the Sheaf, we followed the old course of the Porter Brook, which had once been a long and winding stream that flowed from across the city to merge with the Sheaf. The little stream had been altered almost beyond recognition, however, by mills seeking to use its water for power in the 18th century. Millraces had re-channeled the water into a series of millponds that only vaguely followed the Brook’s original path. Now the remnants of the stream—an ankle-high trickle—flows through concrete troughs and into its own tunnel, and then merges with the Sheaf underground. John, Chris and I followed the water until we came to the concrete mouth of the Porter’s culvert. Turning on headlamps and tugging up our waders, we plunged into the darkness.
SHEFFIELD: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
When we came to the confluence of Porter Brook and the Sheaf, we were also directly underneath the Midland train station. This had been one of the first sections of the river to be covered over, when the station was built in 1870. The station was widely hailed as an engineering masterpiece for utilizing the site over the river, as this meant supporting the culvert against the weight of heavy trains. Looking around, we found ourselves in wide, low tunnel, divided into three channels, with each channel about twelve feet wide and a little taller than my head. Between the channels a series of heavy rough-stone arches looked like they would hold for the next thousand years. But the water level seemed low. The stream mostly flowed in just one or two of the channels, and we were able to walk dry in the third.
By the time Midland Station was built, the city had already turned its back on the Sheaf, though the river was not yet buried. A century before, in 1770, there had been 133 “wheels” (the general name for a factory/mill building with multiple workrooms), which used waterpower to run 896 “troughs,” or individual grinding-wheel workstations. The first steam-powered grinding wheel in Sheffield was installed in 1786, however, and by 1840 the power sources were evenly split. By 1865 there were 132 steam-powered factories and few, if any, that used waterpower.
A copy of a map from the 1890s showed us the factories and mills that had existed close to where we now stood, still at the confluence of the Porter and the Sheaf. There had been over a dozen cutlery, gilding, and silver plate factories within a five-block radius, places like the Pond Hill Works, the Clarence Works, and the Queens Plate and Cutlery Works. There were massive steel and iron mills: the Scandanavian Steel Works, the Soho Rolling Mills, the Central Hammer Works, and others. Larger than anything else, and closest to where now stood, there had been the giant Albion Saw Mills and the Sheaf Saw Mills. Their timber yards abutted the railroad tracks of Midland Station, and like the station the yards had been built over the underground Sheaf. Though next to the Sheaf, these factories and sawmills had all been powered by steam.
Almost all of these business had sprung up in that heady time between about 1819, when the Sheffield Canal was opened to provide a navigable waterway along the River Don, and 1890, when the city had become the undeniable center of the world’s steel and cutlery industries. The population growth during this period had been extremely rapid, from about 65,000 in 1819 when the Canal opened, to 161,475 in the 1851 census just thirty years later. By 1900, the city was close to a half-million, nearly the same as the population today.
Just as in the other industrializing cities of Britain, the downside of this fantastic growth was absolutely terrible conditions for the workers. Grinders suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis, and at mid-century nearly sixty percent of fork, needle, razor, and file grinders would die before age thirty. Children worked ten or twelve hour days in many factories, and an 1862 “Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District” records witnesses such as William Henry Widdicombe, age 8, grinder; Thomas Darwin, age 6, grinder; Maria Lansley, age 9, hand-fly operator; Henry Kay, age 10, riveter; Joseph Broadhead, age 10, saw-glazer; and Sarah Ann Tingle, age 9, fork-filer.
Concomitant with the factory work were terrible, overcrowded living conditions for the workers. This translated into terrible pollution of the Sheaf, as it became both a trash dump and the primary sewer for the dense worker housing along its shores. A doctor speaking at an 1886 commission on contagious diseases complained that the river was “...filthy and disgusting,” and went on to describe what he’d found in the old millponds (or lakes) and in the river itself:
The bed of the River Sheaf, the bottom of the lakes, and the ground occupied by the mill reservoir, are extensively covered with black, decomposing mud, much of which still consists of putrefying organic matter; and, taking note of the dead dogs and cats which may be seen there….the whole appearance of the river and its tributaries, as they pass between and below the houses of Sheffield, is abominable. Offensive gases are constantly escaping in bubbles from the filthy deposit…
Other doctors at the conference agreed that “[t]he state of the Porter and the Sheaf is a disgrace to the civilization of the nineteenth century.” However, with no real possibility of cleaning up the river, their only serious proposal was to make a covered sewer around the last two miles of the Sheaf, between the neighborhood of Heeley and the confluence of the Don. The full length of this proposed culvert was never built, but the doctors would doubtless be gratified to know that by the early twentieth century, a little more than a mile of the river had been almost completely covered over.
By the time Midland Station was built, the city had already turned its back on the Sheaf, though the river was not yet buried. A century before, in 1770, there had been 133 “wheels” (the general name for a factory/mill building with multiple workrooms), which used waterpower to run 896 “troughs,” or individual grinding-wheel workstations. The first steam-powered grinding wheel in Sheffield was installed in 1786, however, and by 1840 the power sources were evenly split. By 1865 there were 132 steam-powered factories and few, if any, that used waterpower.
A copy of a map from the 1890s showed us the factories and mills that had existed close to where we now stood, still at the confluence of the Porter and the Sheaf. There had been over a dozen cutlery, gilding, and silver plate factories within a five-block radius, places like the Pond Hill Works, the Clarence Works, and the Queens Plate and Cutlery Works. There were massive steel and iron mills: the Scandanavian Steel Works, the Soho Rolling Mills, the Central Hammer Works, and others. Larger than anything else, and closest to where now stood, there had been the giant Albion Saw Mills and the Sheaf Saw Mills. Their timber yards abutted the railroad tracks of Midland Station, and like the station the yards had been built over the underground Sheaf. Though next to the Sheaf, these factories and sawmills had all been powered by steam.
Almost all of these business had sprung up in that heady time between about 1819, when the Sheffield Canal was opened to provide a navigable waterway along the River Don, and 1890, when the city had become the undeniable center of the world’s steel and cutlery industries. The population growth during this period had been extremely rapid, from about 65,000 in 1819 when the Canal opened, to 161,475 in the 1851 census just thirty years later. By 1900, the city was close to a half-million, nearly the same as the population today.
Just as in the other industrializing cities of Britain, the downside of this fantastic growth was absolutely terrible conditions for the workers. Grinders suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis, and at mid-century nearly sixty percent of fork, needle, razor, and file grinders would die before age thirty. Children worked ten or twelve hour days in many factories, and an 1862 “Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District” records witnesses such as William Henry Widdicombe, age 8, grinder; Thomas Darwin, age 6, grinder; Maria Lansley, age 9, hand-fly operator; Henry Kay, age 10, riveter; Joseph Broadhead, age 10, saw-glazer; and Sarah Ann Tingle, age 9, fork-filer.
Concomitant with the factory work were terrible, overcrowded living conditions for the workers. This translated into terrible pollution of the Sheaf, as it became both a trash dump and the primary sewer for the dense worker housing along its shores. A doctor speaking at an 1886 commission on contagious diseases complained that the river was “...filthy and disgusting,” and went on to describe what he’d found in the old millponds (or lakes) and in the river itself:
The bed of the River Sheaf, the bottom of the lakes, and the ground occupied by the mill reservoir, are extensively covered with black, decomposing mud, much of which still consists of putrefying organic matter; and, taking note of the dead dogs and cats which may be seen there….the whole appearance of the river and its tributaries, as they pass between and below the houses of Sheffield, is abominable. Offensive gases are constantly escaping in bubbles from the filthy deposit…
Other doctors at the conference agreed that “[t]he state of the Porter and the Sheaf is a disgrace to the civilization of the nineteenth century.” However, with no real possibility of cleaning up the river, their only serious proposal was to make a covered sewer around the last two miles of the Sheaf, between the neighborhood of Heeley and the confluence of the Don. The full length of this proposed culvert was never built, but the doctors would doubtless be gratified to know that by the early twentieth century, a little more than a mile of the river had been almost completely covered over.
SHEFFIELD: SHEFFIELD BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
We walked along in a darkness alleviated only by our headlamps. The water was still shallow, never occupying more than two of the three channels. The arched stonework was beautifully laid, though still of rough stones, and it felt to me like we were in the foundations of a cathedral. The thick stonework completely insulated us from the sounds of the city, and in this silence the trickling and gurgling of the water sounded loud.
“It is no great tax on the imagination to divest the Sheffield of to-day of its furnaces, its rumbling rolling-mills, and its brick and mortar, and to clothe its sharp crests and undulating hollows with their primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” a writer opined in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1884. As I walked along, I tried to imagine that I was walking alongside the full, unpolluted river that Sweyn, the Saxon lord of Sheffield Manor, had looked upon in the 11th Century AD.
“….the Sheaf in those days was an unspoiled, very charming stream with plenty of fish in it, and the banks edged with flowers,” I had read in a book called The Making of Sheffield. The fish had always been so plentiful, in fact, that even into the 19th century some apprentice indenture contracts specified that the master could not make the apprentice eat salmon more often than twice a week. The water that flowed next to me seemed clean enough, with no more refuse than is expected in an urban stream, but I was completely unable to imagine fish in it.
I couldn’t imagine what the river would look like with “primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” either, and so after the trip I looked at old maps of Sheffield to try to see how the river and town had changed. A map from 1780 showed me the Sheaf in a nearly-natural state: far from being covered over, the river was crossed by only a single bridge. The Porter Brook fed two small ponds for watermills—the “Forge Pond,” the water from which went to power grindstones and tilt hammers, and the “Mill Pond,” which powered a mill for grinding grain.
A map from 1832, fifty years later, showed surprisingly few differences. As on the 1780 map, the industrial district seemed to contain only a few mills clustered around the two central millponds. Most of the forges and grinding mills at the time would still have been located in small hamlets outside of town, with a large workshop/mill building employing a dozen people, and with various machinery all powered by a single waterwheel. In a grinding mill, for example, one waterwheel would power six to ten “troughs,” or individual grinding-stations; at each station, the grinder would side or lie in a wooden framework that suspended him over the six-foot-diameter stone grinding wheel.
By 1855, maps began to show an inchoate version of the modern city layout Porter Brook was no longer visible, the water channeled instead through a series of millponds and underground millraces. Three bridges cross the Sheaf in the downtown area, and though the factories and millponds had proliferated since 1832, they remained consolidated in a small area, only about a half-mile square. Just to the south, an expanse of land labeled “The Farm” began around Granville Square, where today’s culvert around the Sheaf ends. In the contemporary city, this landmark is memorialized with a two-block-long street called Farm Road.
“It is no great tax on the imagination to divest the Sheffield of to-day of its furnaces, its rumbling rolling-mills, and its brick and mortar, and to clothe its sharp crests and undulating hollows with their primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” a writer opined in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1884. As I walked along, I tried to imagine that I was walking alongside the full, unpolluted river that Sweyn, the Saxon lord of Sheffield Manor, had looked upon in the 11th Century AD.
“….the Sheaf in those days was an unspoiled, very charming stream with plenty of fish in it, and the banks edged with flowers,” I had read in a book called The Making of Sheffield. The fish had always been so plentiful, in fact, that even into the 19th century some apprentice indenture contracts specified that the master could not make the apprentice eat salmon more often than twice a week. The water that flowed next to me seemed clean enough, with no more refuse than is expected in an urban stream, but I was completely unable to imagine fish in it.
I couldn’t imagine what the river would look like with “primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” either, and so after the trip I looked at old maps of Sheffield to try to see how the river and town had changed. A map from 1780 showed me the Sheaf in a nearly-natural state: far from being covered over, the river was crossed by only a single bridge. The Porter Brook fed two small ponds for watermills—the “Forge Pond,” the water from which went to power grindstones and tilt hammers, and the “Mill Pond,” which powered a mill for grinding grain.
A map from 1832, fifty years later, showed surprisingly few differences. As on the 1780 map, the industrial district seemed to contain only a few mills clustered around the two central millponds. Most of the forges and grinding mills at the time would still have been located in small hamlets outside of town, with a large workshop/mill building employing a dozen people, and with various machinery all powered by a single waterwheel. In a grinding mill, for example, one waterwheel would power six to ten “troughs,” or individual grinding-stations; at each station, the grinder would side or lie in a wooden framework that suspended him over the six-foot-diameter stone grinding wheel.
By 1855, maps began to show an inchoate version of the modern city layout Porter Brook was no longer visible, the water channeled instead through a series of millponds and underground millraces. Three bridges cross the Sheaf in the downtown area, and though the factories and millponds had proliferated since 1832, they remained consolidated in a small area, only about a half-mile square. Just to the south, an expanse of land labeled “The Farm” began around Granville Square, where today’s culvert around the Sheaf ends. In the contemporary city, this landmark is memorialized with a two-block-long street called Farm Road.
SHEFFIELD: TO THE RIVER DON
The tunnel changed shape and size several times, marking different eras of construction of the culvert. All were stone or brickwork. Above, Sheaf Street followed our exact route; most of the street had been laid directly over the culvert. Close to the Don, we were now in an older area of the city, where some of the first millponds had been. Appropriately, the neighborhood that was above us is named Pond Hill, and nearby is Pond Street.
The tunnels under Pond Hill were the largest we’d yet seen, and they were made of finished stone instead of the rough blocks we’d seen earlier. I estimated that the arched channels are about twenty feet high. The Brobdingnagian proportions seemed ludicrous when compared with the twelve-inch-deep stream that flowed past our boots. Incredibly, the tunnel expanded again as we came into sight of the outlet to the River Don: a truly vast chamber, with an arched ceiling that made me think of being in a cathedral or a stadium. I later found out that the masonry arch that loomed over us had originally been the Canal Bridge, which had connected the city center (just to the west of the Sheaf) to the Sheffield Canal basin (just to the east of the Sheaf).
The water has not always been so low. On the night of March 11th, 1864, heavy rains caused Sheffield’s new water-supply dam to break a few miles east of town. Nearly three million tons of water roared down the Loxley River valley, into the Don, and through the center of town. Between 240 and 290 people were killed. The London Times reported that sleeping residents were drowned “like rats in a hole.” The water was high enough near the mouth of the Sheaf (where it connects with the Don) that children were drowned in their second-story bedrooms, and the next day corpses were found stuck in a tree and lodged at the top of a haystack.
Maybe this had been on the mind of the builders of the tunnel when they made it so grand. In fact, the Sheaf has continued to flood occasionally, and in sections where its channel is not quite as large, it has burst its banks and flooded nearby areas. Just a few months prior to our visit, on June 25, 2007, heavy rains had caused both the Sheaf and the Don to swell over their banks; a 13-year old boy was wept away and drowned by the Sheaf.
The River Don was the end of our journey, and we climbed along the waterline and up the riverbank, streaming water. I was happy that we’d come out here; just about where we climbed up the riverbank, I knew, there had once been the clearing that gave Sheffield its name—a field along the Sheaf (or Shef) River, where a Saxon village developed. After the Norman conquest of 1066 AD, a castle had been built on the same spot, and just as the Sheaf is below the contemporary city, fragments of the old castle still exist beneath today’s Castle Market.
In fact Sheffield history can be traced back much further even than that. The very oldest evidence of human-built dwellings in England—remnants of a hut from 10,000 years ago—was discovered in a region in northern Sheffield. The residents of these earliest built structures doubtless drank and fished in these same rivers and streams, and perhaps it would be possible find out enough to determine just how their community interacted with rivers and other still-extant parts of their environment. But I was satisfied already. The River Sheaf has flowed through all of Sheffield’s history, and with it as a connecting thread we had already explored nearly a thousand years of the city’s past. That’s plenty for one day. We packed up our gear and set off to walk back to the car—aboveground, and fully in the present.
The tunnels under Pond Hill were the largest we’d yet seen, and they were made of finished stone instead of the rough blocks we’d seen earlier. I estimated that the arched channels are about twenty feet high. The Brobdingnagian proportions seemed ludicrous when compared with the twelve-inch-deep stream that flowed past our boots. Incredibly, the tunnel expanded again as we came into sight of the outlet to the River Don: a truly vast chamber, with an arched ceiling that made me think of being in a cathedral or a stadium. I later found out that the masonry arch that loomed over us had originally been the Canal Bridge, which had connected the city center (just to the west of the Sheaf) to the Sheffield Canal basin (just to the east of the Sheaf).
The water has not always been so low. On the night of March 11th, 1864, heavy rains caused Sheffield’s new water-supply dam to break a few miles east of town. Nearly three million tons of water roared down the Loxley River valley, into the Don, and through the center of town. Between 240 and 290 people were killed. The London Times reported that sleeping residents were drowned “like rats in a hole.” The water was high enough near the mouth of the Sheaf (where it connects with the Don) that children were drowned in their second-story bedrooms, and the next day corpses were found stuck in a tree and lodged at the top of a haystack.
Maybe this had been on the mind of the builders of the tunnel when they made it so grand. In fact, the Sheaf has continued to flood occasionally, and in sections where its channel is not quite as large, it has burst its banks and flooded nearby areas. Just a few months prior to our visit, on June 25, 2007, heavy rains had caused both the Sheaf and the Don to swell over their banks; a 13-year old boy was wept away and drowned by the Sheaf.
The River Don was the end of our journey, and we climbed along the waterline and up the riverbank, streaming water. I was happy that we’d come out here; just about where we climbed up the riverbank, I knew, there had once been the clearing that gave Sheffield its name—a field along the Sheaf (or Shef) River, where a Saxon village developed. After the Norman conquest of 1066 AD, a castle had been built on the same spot, and just as the Sheaf is below the contemporary city, fragments of the old castle still exist beneath today’s Castle Market.
In fact Sheffield history can be traced back much further even than that. The very oldest evidence of human-built dwellings in England—remnants of a hut from 10,000 years ago—was discovered in a region in northern Sheffield. The residents of these earliest built structures doubtless drank and fished in these same rivers and streams, and perhaps it would be possible find out enough to determine just how their community interacted with rivers and other still-extant parts of their environment. But I was satisfied already. The River Sheaf has flowed through all of Sheffield’s history, and with it as a connecting thread we had already explored nearly a thousand years of the city’s past. That’s plenty for one day. We packed up our gear and set off to walk back to the car—aboveground, and fully in the present.
BRADFORD: BACKGROUND & BRITAIN’S WOOL TRADE
It’s in the very nature of this green and pleasant land
you’re bound to find a watercourse runs very close at hand—
our rivers and canals are full of good ol’ English rain,
but if you come to Bradford you will look for one in vain!
From somewhere up near Allerton, I tumble down to town
but the pleasure ends near Four Lane Ends as I’m shoved underground.
And what goes on as I flow on
nobody gives a damn
Instead of being a chuckling stream
a sewer’s what I am!
Lyrics from “Bradford Beck,” composed and sung by Eddie Lawler, 2002.
Bradford grew incredibly during the Industrial Revolution, exploding from a population of just 13,264 in the 1801 census to 104,000 by 1850. Historically a center for Yorkshire-region wool, it had started to become the national center for woolens and worsteds in the 18th century as new mechanical processing replaced the hand-spinning techniques that were still guild-protected in the older wool centers to the south. As steam power began to be used around 1800, Bradford and its neighbor Leeds also found themselves to be perfectly positioned “where the coal supply of south Yorkshire [met] the wool supply of north Yorkshire.” By 1819, Bradford was considered the “centre and principal seat of the stuff trade in the kingdom.”
The wool trade continued to centralize around Bradford and Leeds throughout the 19th century, each specializing in certain types of production—Bradford’s specialty was made clear by its nickname “Worstedopolis.” As the processing centers for most of Britain’s wool, it would be hard to overstate the importance of these two cities to the economy of the Empire. “Only light and frivolous persons,” one historian wrote sternly, “will consider wool as too slight a basis for the foundation stone of the empire on which the sun never sets.” Wool had long been the country’s chief export, and poetic descriptions from prior centuries had called it “the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England” and “eminently the foundation of English riches.” Wool from the British Isles had been valued on the Continent since Roman days, and since the 14th century the official seat of the Lord Chancellor of England has been the ‘Woolsack,’ quite literally a sack filled with wool as a symbol the nation’s trade and wealth. Through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, Bradford would have a key role in producing that wealth.
BRADFORD: PREPARING FOR THE BRADFORD BECK
To see what we could of Bradford’s underlying history, John, Chris, and I hoped to visit the Bradford Beck, a river that now runs underneath Bradford in a series of culverts and bypasses. The river flows toward Bradford in a nearly straight line from the west, curves in a U-shape beneath the very heart of the city, and then meanders north-east to join the River Aire, about four miles away. Along the way it passes nearly underneath the 19th-century City Hall building, and flows along the side of the 15th-century Bradford Cathedral.
We met with Will, a Bradford native, who would guide us through the Beck. “It’s not as big as Sheffield’s tunnels,” he told us, “but it’s a lot longer. It goes about six or seven kilometers underground.”
With Will, we had two cars, which was convenient in allowing us to leave one car at our exit, instead of having to walk back wet to one car through sub-freezing weather. (It would be much warmer than that underground, protected from the wind and warmed by the city above.) We deposited the car and drove back toward our entrance, where we suited up with hip- or chest-high waders, jackets, gloves, hats and headlamps, a carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide gas meter, and more.
In the parking lot where were getting dressed, our preparations seemed a little ludicrous for what was, essentially, a walk through a city. We’d never be more than a few dozen linear feet distant from busy roads and sidewalks where people in normal clothes went about their lives without worrying about backup headlamps, spare batteries, or gas meters. Nonetheless, I was enjoying our preparations. They helped to accent the fact that we weren’t simply visiting the Bradford that everyone else sees. Venturing into this unfrequented and usually unseen layer of the urban fabric, we would indeed be cut off from the surface, and the fact that our destination was so removed from the contemporary, aboveground city made it all the easier for me to imagine that we were actually journeying into the city’s past.
When we were finally ready, we climbed down an embankment and into shallow but fast-moving water in a wide open-cut channel. We followed it downstream, and soon came to the beginning of the main culvert under Ingleby Road. We were under the eastern neighborhood of Four Lane Ends; we would not come back aboveground until we had passed Canal Road near Frizinghall, having covered more than half of the distance between the Bradford city center and the Bradford Beck’s outfall into the River Aire.
We met with Will, a Bradford native, who would guide us through the Beck. “It’s not as big as Sheffield’s tunnels,” he told us, “but it’s a lot longer. It goes about six or seven kilometers underground.”
With Will, we had two cars, which was convenient in allowing us to leave one car at our exit, instead of having to walk back wet to one car through sub-freezing weather. (It would be much warmer than that underground, protected from the wind and warmed by the city above.) We deposited the car and drove back toward our entrance, where we suited up with hip- or chest-high waders, jackets, gloves, hats and headlamps, a carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide gas meter, and more.
In the parking lot where were getting dressed, our preparations seemed a little ludicrous for what was, essentially, a walk through a city. We’d never be more than a few dozen linear feet distant from busy roads and sidewalks where people in normal clothes went about their lives without worrying about backup headlamps, spare batteries, or gas meters. Nonetheless, I was enjoying our preparations. They helped to accent the fact that we weren’t simply visiting the Bradford that everyone else sees. Venturing into this unfrequented and usually unseen layer of the urban fabric, we would indeed be cut off from the surface, and the fact that our destination was so removed from the contemporary, aboveground city made it all the easier for me to imagine that we were actually journeying into the city’s past.
When we were finally ready, we climbed down an embankment and into shallow but fast-moving water in a wide open-cut channel. We followed it downstream, and soon came to the beginning of the main culvert under Ingleby Road. We were under the eastern neighborhood of Four Lane Ends; we would not come back aboveground until we had passed Canal Road near Frizinghall, having covered more than half of the distance between the Bradford city center and the Bradford Beck’s outfall into the River Aire.
BRADFORD: WOOL PRODUCTION AND BRADFORD’S EARLY HISTORY
Between 1066, when the De Laci (or De Lacy) patriarch had come to the country with William the Conqueror, and 1311, when the last heir of the family died, the entire region under which we walked had been the estate of the De Lacis. The region was conducive to sheep farming and many of their tenants and burgesses raised sheep. In the first recorded use of the Bradford Beck to power wool-processing machinery, the De Lacis built a water-powered fulling mill, of which their many sheep-herding tenants and burgesses were permitted free use. Fulling was a difficult process of agitating and beating wool cloth to both lock the fibers together and to clean them; it was a vital finishing step for cloth woven or knitted from yarn, and was even more important in the process of making more primitive felted cloth.
The labor-saving water mill was the first step in the centralization of the region’s wool productions. Along with a mill for grinding grain (also built by the De Lacis, and powered by a waterwheel on the Beck), it was the focal point for a slow agglomeration of sheep-farmers and others into a village that would eventually grow into the world’s largest center for processing wool. By the early 16th century, Bradford had already begun to grow on the basis of its wool and cloth production. “[It is] a pretty, quick, market town….It standeth much by clothing,” the writer John Leland wrote in his Itinerary after a visit in 1536.
In many respects, Bradford was ideally located in terms of its natural resources. The Bradford Beck, though the largest, was not the only stream serving the town; there were more than a dozen tributaries that fed into it, ranging in size from the large Bowling Beck to small streams known as “sykes.” As in Nottingham, this plethora of watercourses assisted in irrigation and in raising livestock, and because they were generally fast-flowing, with large vertical drops from the surrounding hills, these streams also easily served to power watermills. The many streams also helped in washing wool, a process that required constantly moving water to carry away the large deposits of grease, lanolin, and dirt that accumulated on sheep. More importantly, the water of the region was particularly soft, which was ideal for washing wool. Along with these natural advantages, “the persevering industry of the inhabitants, and the abundant supplies of water-power, of coal, and of building stone….maintained Bradford in its position as one of the great manufacturing towns of West Riding,” wrote the historian Thomas Baines about 17th- and early 18th-century Bradford.
However, Bradford lacked a navigable watercourse. The Beck was rapid but shallow, despite its many tributaries. Leeds was less than ten miles away from Bradford, but it was connected to the coast by the large River Aire, and this was probably a factor in the huge success of its cloth market—described by Daniel Defoe in 1724 as “a Prodigy of its Kind, and perhaps not to be equaled in the World.”
Doubtless inspired by the success of its neighbor, Bradford began two ambitious projects in the 1770s: the construction of Piece Hall, where weavers and merchants could buy and sell “pieces” of finished cloth, and the Bradford Canal, which would connect the city to the River Aire and to the Liverpool & Leeds Canal. Piece Hall, finished in 1773, was one of the first dedicated marketplace buildings of its kind in the country, though soon similar venues would be built in many other cities as well. Even more important was the Bradford Canal, completed in 1774. It ran four miles to the Aire, and was probably the most vital infrastructure investment that Bradford could have made for its future. Via the Aire, the canal connected to the Humber Estuary on the east coast, and in 1816, the completion of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal connected it with the Liverpool’s port on the west coast as well. The water of the Bradford Beck was diverted into the canal to fill it, and the cheap waterborne shipping the canal provided—on Bradford Beck water—was in a large part what paved the way for the explosion of population and industry over the next seventy-five years.
The labor-saving water mill was the first step in the centralization of the region’s wool productions. Along with a mill for grinding grain (also built by the De Lacis, and powered by a waterwheel on the Beck), it was the focal point for a slow agglomeration of sheep-farmers and others into a village that would eventually grow into the world’s largest center for processing wool. By the early 16th century, Bradford had already begun to grow on the basis of its wool and cloth production. “[It is] a pretty, quick, market town….It standeth much by clothing,” the writer John Leland wrote in his Itinerary after a visit in 1536.
In many respects, Bradford was ideally located in terms of its natural resources. The Bradford Beck, though the largest, was not the only stream serving the town; there were more than a dozen tributaries that fed into it, ranging in size from the large Bowling Beck to small streams known as “sykes.” As in Nottingham, this plethora of watercourses assisted in irrigation and in raising livestock, and because they were generally fast-flowing, with large vertical drops from the surrounding hills, these streams also easily served to power watermills. The many streams also helped in washing wool, a process that required constantly moving water to carry away the large deposits of grease, lanolin, and dirt that accumulated on sheep. More importantly, the water of the region was particularly soft, which was ideal for washing wool. Along with these natural advantages, “the persevering industry of the inhabitants, and the abundant supplies of water-power, of coal, and of building stone….maintained Bradford in its position as one of the great manufacturing towns of West Riding,” wrote the historian Thomas Baines about 17th- and early 18th-century Bradford.
However, Bradford lacked a navigable watercourse. The Beck was rapid but shallow, despite its many tributaries. Leeds was less than ten miles away from Bradford, but it was connected to the coast by the large River Aire, and this was probably a factor in the huge success of its cloth market—described by Daniel Defoe in 1724 as “a Prodigy of its Kind, and perhaps not to be equaled in the World.”
Doubtless inspired by the success of its neighbor, Bradford began two ambitious projects in the 1770s: the construction of Piece Hall, where weavers and merchants could buy and sell “pieces” of finished cloth, and the Bradford Canal, which would connect the city to the River Aire and to the Liverpool & Leeds Canal. Piece Hall, finished in 1773, was one of the first dedicated marketplace buildings of its kind in the country, though soon similar venues would be built in many other cities as well. Even more important was the Bradford Canal, completed in 1774. It ran four miles to the Aire, and was probably the most vital infrastructure investment that Bradford could have made for its future. Via the Aire, the canal connected to the Humber Estuary on the east coast, and in 1816, the completion of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal connected it with the Liverpool’s port on the west coast as well. The water of the Bradford Beck was diverted into the canal to fill it, and the cheap waterborne shipping the canal provided—on Bradford Beck water—was in a large part what paved the way for the explosion of population and industry over the next seventy-five years.
BRADFORD: STEAM AND SEWAGE
Where we had first entered the culvert, it had been constructed of large stone blocks, with a flat floor and a rounded stone arch at the top. The shape and composition of the tunnel varied widely as we waded along, however, ranging from rounded brick conduits that looked like Victorian-era sewers to stone-walled, flat-ceilinged sections that had clearly been open channels before being covered. In some areas the stream ran through foundations of old buildings, which may or may not have still existed on the surface. Shafts of sunlight found us once or twice; some of the older industrial buildings had been built over the Beck before it was completely covered, and when one of them was torn down and replaced with a smaller building, small gaps were left. Side channels connected to the main tunnel occasionally, either outlets for anonymous, culverted tributary streams, or overflow outfalls for the sewer system. Though I couldn’t identify it, I knew that one of the inflowing channels we saw was the Goit, a now-culverted bypass channel that served as a millrace for watermills from as early as the 14th century well into the 19th.
Steam power had begun to replace waterpower in Bradford in 1798, when the first factory powered by a steam engine was set up on Edmund Street, just a few hundred feet south of where we walked through the tunnel. (The first attempt to bring in steam power for a mill had been in 1793, but a conservative group of merchants had brought suit against the mill owner to block the installation of the engine, worrying that “the smoke from the engine furnace would be a nuisance.” ) At the time there was still only limited mechanization in the wool industry; fulling was done with water or steam-powered machinery, of course, but the 1801 the census of Bradford recorded only one spinning mill in operation—most was still done by hand.
By 1841, however, there were thirty-eight worsted spinning mills in Bradford itself, seventy in the region, and an incredible two-thirds of all England’s wool was being processed in or near the city. By 1850 the city had 129 mills—now running on steam—employing thousands of workers, and drawing labor from throughout Europe. The result was an eight-fold increase over the 1801 population in a period of just fifty years, with over 100,000 people in the city by mid-century; this would double again to over 200,000 by the end of the century.
As with other industrial boom-towns, the surge in population turned the town’s streets and rivers into open sewers. As early as 1837, a sanitary surveyor declared Bradford to be “the most filthy town I visited," full of “open cesspits, pig styes and slaughterhouses and effluent-laden watercourses.” The greasy wastes from the wool industry were a particular problem, and the nature of the Beck changed almost overnight. Residents of the town could still remember catching trout in a sparkling stream when they’d been boys, but by 1840 both the Beck and the Aire had been turned into “the receptacles of all kinds of filth, and tippings, and the trout, graylings, eels and tench, were exterminated.”
By the 1850s, it was even worse. “This brook at present runs the colour of ink,” declared a reporter for London’s Morning Chronicle about the Beck. The same waters fed the Bradford Canal, and the industrial pollution actually made the waterway flammable. Local boys would light it on fire for fun, and according to testimony at an 1867 commission on river pollution, the flames would rise six feet and would run along the water “for many yards, like a will-o-the-wisp.” Canal boats nearby would be “so enveloped in flame as to frighten persons on board.”
Even more dangerous than fire or industrial pollution was disease. “[L]ike a filthy open sewer, [the canal] runs along the border of the town, breathing pestilence and death,” testified another resident in 1866. This was hardly an exaggeration. As happened with all cities of the era whose expanded population created irredeemably unsanitary conditions, cholera, typhoid, and other diseases were spread through tainted water. Significant cholera epidemics had already occurred in 1832, 1849, 1853, 1854 and 1856. Partly because of diseases, the life expectancy was the lowest in the region, with an average of only about eighteen years. Less than one-third of the children of textile workers would live past the age of fifteen.
In 1867, the city prohibited the use of Bradford Beck water in the canal, which soon ran dry. The Beck’s only real utility to the town was now as a main sewer, and in that capacity the stream served as the depository for all of the town’s waste. Even when sewer pipes had first been installed in Bradford, in the mid-19th century, they merely dumped the (untreated) sewage directly into the Beck, to the deep unhappiness of downstream landowners on both the Beck and the Aire. In 1869 one of these landowners, a William Stansfield of Esholt Hall, obtained an injunction mandating that Bradford treat its sewage before releasing it into the river. The first treatment plant proved to be a failure as the grease from the wool mills made the sewage exceptionally difficult to treat, but continued injunctions forced the city to continue investing in treatment facilities. Ironically, in 1899, the city took over William Stansfield’s Esholt estate on the Aire for a new treatment plant, and the Esholt Sewage Works continues to be Bradford’s main treatment plant today. In the 1920s, the three-mile Esholt Sewage Disposal tunnel was dug to directly connect the city’s sewer system to the Esholt works, and the Bradford Beck was finally freed of its sewerage burden. By this time, however, the river had already been completely culverted through the center of town, and so few fully appreciated the change that had taken place.
Steam power had begun to replace waterpower in Bradford in 1798, when the first factory powered by a steam engine was set up on Edmund Street, just a few hundred feet south of where we walked through the tunnel. (The first attempt to bring in steam power for a mill had been in 1793, but a conservative group of merchants had brought suit against the mill owner to block the installation of the engine, worrying that “the smoke from the engine furnace would be a nuisance.” ) At the time there was still only limited mechanization in the wool industry; fulling was done with water or steam-powered machinery, of course, but the 1801 the census of Bradford recorded only one spinning mill in operation—most was still done by hand.
By 1841, however, there were thirty-eight worsted spinning mills in Bradford itself, seventy in the region, and an incredible two-thirds of all England’s wool was being processed in or near the city. By 1850 the city had 129 mills—now running on steam—employing thousands of workers, and drawing labor from throughout Europe. The result was an eight-fold increase over the 1801 population in a period of just fifty years, with over 100,000 people in the city by mid-century; this would double again to over 200,000 by the end of the century.
As with other industrial boom-towns, the surge in population turned the town’s streets and rivers into open sewers. As early as 1837, a sanitary surveyor declared Bradford to be “the most filthy town I visited," full of “open cesspits, pig styes and slaughterhouses and effluent-laden watercourses.” The greasy wastes from the wool industry were a particular problem, and the nature of the Beck changed almost overnight. Residents of the town could still remember catching trout in a sparkling stream when they’d been boys, but by 1840 both the Beck and the Aire had been turned into “the receptacles of all kinds of filth, and tippings, and the trout, graylings, eels and tench, were exterminated.”
By the 1850s, it was even worse. “This brook at present runs the colour of ink,” declared a reporter for London’s Morning Chronicle about the Beck. The same waters fed the Bradford Canal, and the industrial pollution actually made the waterway flammable. Local boys would light it on fire for fun, and according to testimony at an 1867 commission on river pollution, the flames would rise six feet and would run along the water “for many yards, like a will-o-the-wisp.” Canal boats nearby would be “so enveloped in flame as to frighten persons on board.”
Even more dangerous than fire or industrial pollution was disease. “[L]ike a filthy open sewer, [the canal] runs along the border of the town, breathing pestilence and death,” testified another resident in 1866. This was hardly an exaggeration. As happened with all cities of the era whose expanded population created irredeemably unsanitary conditions, cholera, typhoid, and other diseases were spread through tainted water. Significant cholera epidemics had already occurred in 1832, 1849, 1853, 1854 and 1856. Partly because of diseases, the life expectancy was the lowest in the region, with an average of only about eighteen years. Less than one-third of the children of textile workers would live past the age of fifteen.
In 1867, the city prohibited the use of Bradford Beck water in the canal, which soon ran dry. The Beck’s only real utility to the town was now as a main sewer, and in that capacity the stream served as the depository for all of the town’s waste. Even when sewer pipes had first been installed in Bradford, in the mid-19th century, they merely dumped the (untreated) sewage directly into the Beck, to the deep unhappiness of downstream landowners on both the Beck and the Aire. In 1869 one of these landowners, a William Stansfield of Esholt Hall, obtained an injunction mandating that Bradford treat its sewage before releasing it into the river. The first treatment plant proved to be a failure as the grease from the wool mills made the sewage exceptionally difficult to treat, but continued injunctions forced the city to continue investing in treatment facilities. Ironically, in 1899, the city took over William Stansfield’s Esholt estate on the Aire for a new treatment plant, and the Esholt Sewage Works continues to be Bradford’s main treatment plant today. In the 1920s, the three-mile Esholt Sewage Disposal tunnel was dug to directly connect the city’s sewer system to the Esholt works, and the Bradford Beck was finally freed of its sewerage burden. By this time, however, the river had already been completely culverted through the center of town, and so few fully appreciated the change that had taken place.
BRADFORD: AT THE END AND THE BEGINNING
By now, the tunnel we had come through had varied from all the way from 20th-century concrete with rusted steel girders supporting brick-arch roofs to sections that seemed drawn from the Neolithic era, with rough blocks forming the side walls and huge rectangular slabs of quarried stone stretching ten feet across from wall to wall to form the top of the culvert. We knew we were under Centenary Square at the heart of Bradford, however, when we came out into a magnificent chamber of stone-work arches. It looked like the crypt of a remarkably beautiful cathedral, though in fact the Bradford Cathedral was still a short distance ahead. Instead, we were almost directly under Bradford’s ornate Victorian-era City Hall. In addition the beautiful construction of this underground room—one of the first sections to be covered in the late 19th century—another landmark that showed our location was the confluence of our tunnel with another that contained an almost equally powerful flow of water. This was the Bowling Beck, the Bradford Beck’s largest tributary.
The combined flow of water, we quickly realized, was powerful enough that it could actually move us slowly along even when we stood still, with both boots planted; there was not enough traction on the slippery floor to resist the push of the current. This made our wading more difficult, and when we reached a wider section we decided to rest along the raised stone path at the side. Small, fibrous tree roots had infiltrated through the rotten mortar between stones, and stalactite formations showed the age of the tunnel. We were approximately next Bradford Cathedral, the oldest building in Bradford. This meant that we were also at Bradford’s origin, as the “broad ford” that gave both the city and the river their names is generally agreed to have been just at the spot where the Beck passes the Cathedral. Somewhere very close to where we sat was the ancient site of the crossing, the original center of Bradford.
Parts of the Cathedral date back to the 15th century, when it was still the Parish Church of St. Peter, and the 15th century church replaced another from the 14th century or before. Fragments of Saxon crosses have been found on the same site, meaning that some sort of settlement had existed here since at least the 10th century, and probably much earlier than that.
I looked at the water flowing over my boots. For more than a millennium, people had been right here with this same flow of water, dipping their feet in it, drinking from it, fouling it with waste, wading through it, fishing in it, washing in it.
In the light of my headlamp, it still sparkled.
The combined flow of water, we quickly realized, was powerful enough that it could actually move us slowly along even when we stood still, with both boots planted; there was not enough traction on the slippery floor to resist the push of the current. This made our wading more difficult, and when we reached a wider section we decided to rest along the raised stone path at the side. Small, fibrous tree roots had infiltrated through the rotten mortar between stones, and stalactite formations showed the age of the tunnel. We were approximately next Bradford Cathedral, the oldest building in Bradford. This meant that we were also at Bradford’s origin, as the “broad ford” that gave both the city and the river their names is generally agreed to have been just at the spot where the Beck passes the Cathedral. Somewhere very close to where we sat was the ancient site of the crossing, the original center of Bradford.
Parts of the Cathedral date back to the 15th century, when it was still the Parish Church of St. Peter, and the 15th century church replaced another from the 14th century or before. Fragments of Saxon crosses have been found on the same site, meaning that some sort of settlement had existed here since at least the 10th century, and probably much earlier than that.
I looked at the water flowing over my boots. For more than a millennium, people had been right here with this same flow of water, dipping their feet in it, drinking from it, fouling it with waste, wading through it, fishing in it, washing in it.
In the light of my headlamp, it still sparkled.
SOURCES: NOTTINGHAM
“Nottingham Chamberlain’s Account Book, listing the costs, repairs, and expenses made by John Coste and John Howett, chamberlains of the town of Nottingham, from 29 September 1485 to the same date in 1486.” Nottinghamshire Archives. Transcription in: Stevenson, W.H., ed. Records of the Borough of Nottingham. London and Nottingham, 1883, vol. 3. (Original language was Middle English; translation available at http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/florilegium/community/cmfabr11.html)
Aldous, R.C., Assoc. M.Inst. C.E., Deputy City Engineer, Nottingham. “Nottingham Main Drainage Works.” In The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 1936; 57; 100; DOI: 10.1177/146642403605700206; online at http://rsh.sagepub.com.
Deering, Charles. Nottinghamia Vetus Et Nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of Nottingham. Printed by and for G. Ayscough & T. Willington, Nottingham, 1751.
Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches, Diocese of Southwell & Nottingham. “Church History Project Database: Nottingham St. Catherine.” Online at http://southwellchurches.nottingham.ac.uk/n10/hhistory.html
Aldous, R.C., Assoc. M.Inst. C.E., Deputy City Engineer, Nottingham. “Nottingham Main Drainage Works.” In The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 1936; 57; 100; DOI: 10.1177/146642403605700206; online at http://rsh.sagepub.com.
Deering, Charles. Nottinghamia Vetus Et Nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of Nottingham. Printed by and for G. Ayscough & T. Willington, Nottingham, 1751.
Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches, Diocese of Southwell & Nottingham. “Church History Project Database: Nottingham St. Catherine.” Online at http://southwellchurches.nottingham.ac.uk/n10/hhistory.html
SOURCES: SHEFFIELD
“Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District.” 1862. Online at: http://youle.info/history/fh_material/childrens_employment_1862.txt
“What are the best means of preventing the spread of Contagious Disease?” Statements of Dr Stevenson Macadam, Edinburgh, and Dr J.C. Hall, Sheffield. Report of the proceedings of the "Conference on Temperance Legislation, London, 1886.” Edited by George Woodyatt Hastings, Andrew Edgar, Charles Wager Ryalls, Edwin Pears. Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science.
Baines, Edward. History, Directory & Gazeteer, of the County of York. Published 1822; sold by Hurst and Robinson.
Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.
BBC News. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk. Articles: “Three dead following flood chaos,” June 26 2007; “Two die in Sheffield flood chaos,” June 25, 2007
BarlowGeneology.com. “The Barlow Knife.” Online at http://www.barlowgenealogy.com/Edson/barlowknife.html
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales: Reeve’s Tale. Excerpt:
Ay by his belt he baar a long panade,
And of a swerd ful trenchant was the blade.
A joly poppere baar he in his pouche;
Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.
A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.
Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District, 1862, referenced at http://youle.info/history/fh_material/childrens_employment_1862.txt
Defoe, Daniel. A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies (London, 1726), Letter 8, Part 3: South and West Yorkshire.
Department Town & Regional Planning research group of the Sheffield Centre for Geographic Information and Spatial Analysis (SCGISA), at the University of Sheffield. “The Changing Face of Sheffield.” Accessed online at http://www.shef.ac.uk/~scgisa/
Domesday Book, 1086. The full reference to Sheffield (translated): [At] Attercliffe and Sheffield, two manors, Sweyn had five carucates of land [approximately 120 acres]. There may have been about three ploughs [=about 24 oxen, or three teams of 8]. This land is said to have been the inland demesne [domain] of the manor of Hallam.
Great Britain Historical GIS Project.”Sheffield District: Total Population.” Part of A Vision of Britain Through Time. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield#Population_change
Hunter, Joseph. Hallamshire. The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York, Chapter III. Published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. London 1819. Online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hallamshire._The_History_and_Topography_of_the_Parish_of_Sheffield_in_the_County_of_York
Illustrated London News. “BURSTING OF THE BRADFIELD RESERVOIR, NEAR SHEFFIELD. — TWO HUNDRED LIVES LOST.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html
Illustrated London News. “THE SHEFFIELD CALAMITY.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html
Lee, Chris. “The Porter Brook Home Page: Old Maps of the Porter Brook.” Online at: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~leebase/Pages/Old%20Maps.htm
Map: 1890 OS Map, accessed through Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank (SUCoD), The University of Sheffield, School of Architecture, 2001-2003; http://sucod.shef.ac.uk/
Map: Gosling, “A Plan of Sheffield,” 1736
Orwell, George. Diary, dated March 5 1936. Online at http://www.chrishobbs.com/orwellsheffield1936.htm
Palmer, Henry J. “Cutlery and Cutlers at Sheffield.” The English Illustrated Magazine, August 1884
Pollard, S. The History of Labour in Sheffield. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1959. P. 53. Chapter 2 online at: http://youle.info/history/Pollard/Chapter_2.html
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe: A Romance. Reprinted by Signet Classic, 2001.
Stainton, J.H. The Making of Sheffield, 1865-1914.
White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory, of the west-riding of Yorkshire. 1837.
Williamson, William R. “BOWIE KNIFE.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Online at: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/lnb1.html
“What are the best means of preventing the spread of Contagious Disease?” Statements of Dr Stevenson Macadam, Edinburgh, and Dr J.C. Hall, Sheffield. Report of the proceedings of the "Conference on Temperance Legislation, London, 1886.” Edited by George Woodyatt Hastings, Andrew Edgar, Charles Wager Ryalls, Edwin Pears. Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science.
Baines, Edward. History, Directory & Gazeteer, of the County of York. Published 1822; sold by Hurst and Robinson.
Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.
BBC News. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk. Articles: “Three dead following flood chaos,” June 26 2007; “Two die in Sheffield flood chaos,” June 25, 2007
BarlowGeneology.com. “The Barlow Knife.” Online at http://www.barlowgenealogy.com/Edson/barlowknife.html
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales: Reeve’s Tale. Excerpt:
Ay by his belt he baar a long panade,
And of a swerd ful trenchant was the blade.
A joly poppere baar he in his pouche;
Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.
A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.
Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District, 1862, referenced at http://youle.info/history/fh_material/childrens_employment_1862.txt
Defoe, Daniel. A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies (London, 1726), Letter 8, Part 3: South and West Yorkshire.
Department Town & Regional Planning research group of the Sheffield Centre for Geographic Information and Spatial Analysis (SCGISA), at the University of Sheffield. “The Changing Face of Sheffield.” Accessed online at http://www.shef.ac.uk/~scgisa/
Domesday Book, 1086. The full reference to Sheffield (translated): [At] Attercliffe and Sheffield, two manors, Sweyn had five carucates of land [approximately 120 acres]. There may have been about three ploughs [=about 24 oxen, or three teams of 8]. This land is said to have been the inland demesne [domain] of the manor of Hallam.
Great Britain Historical GIS Project.”Sheffield District: Total Population.” Part of A Vision of Britain Through Time. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield#Population_change
Hunter, Joseph. Hallamshire. The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York, Chapter III. Published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. London 1819. Online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hallamshire._The_History_and_Topography_of_the_Parish_of_Sheffield_in_the_County_of_York
Illustrated London News. “BURSTING OF THE BRADFIELD RESERVOIR, NEAR SHEFFIELD. — TWO HUNDRED LIVES LOST.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html
Illustrated London News. “THE SHEFFIELD CALAMITY.” Saturday, March 19, 1864, (No. 1250, Vol. XLIV), online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mossvalley/mv2/sheffield-flood.html
Lee, Chris. “The Porter Brook Home Page: Old Maps of the Porter Brook.” Online at: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~leebase/Pages/Old%20Maps.htm
Map: 1890 OS Map, accessed through Sheffield Urban Contextual Databank (SUCoD), The University of Sheffield, School of Architecture, 2001-2003; http://sucod.shef.ac.uk/
Map: Gosling, “A Plan of Sheffield,” 1736
Orwell, George. Diary, dated March 5 1936. Online at http://www.chrishobbs.com/orwellsheffield1936.htm
Palmer, Henry J. “Cutlery and Cutlers at Sheffield.” The English Illustrated Magazine, August 1884
Pollard, S. The History of Labour in Sheffield. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1959. P. 53. Chapter 2 online at: http://youle.info/history/Pollard/Chapter_2.html
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe: A Romance. Reprinted by Signet Classic, 2001.
Stainton, J.H. The Making of Sheffield, 1865-1914.
White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory, of the west-riding of Yorkshire. 1837.
Williamson, William R. “BOWIE KNIFE.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Online at: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/lnb1.html
SOURCES: BRADFORD
SOURCES: BRADFORD
"Address before the National association of wool manufacturers, at the first annual meeting in Philadelphia, Sept. 6, 1865,” by John L Hayes, Secretary. Published by John Wilson and Sons, Cambridge, MA, 1865. Online at http://www.archive.org/stream/addressbeforenat00hayeiala/addressbeforenat00hayeiala_djvu.txt
“Inquisition Post Mortem, on the death of Henry De Laci the last Earl of Lincoln, 1311, 5th Edward II” reproduced in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877, Vol 2. P. 251
“Sanitary Report by Mr. Smith of Deanston, 1837.” Referenced in Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.
Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.
City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. “Bradford’s History.” Online at: http://www.bradford.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/hobbies_and_interests/bradfords_history.htm
Clapp, B.W. An Environmental History of Britain. London, 1994.
Crosier, Pete. “The Victorian way of...death!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_death_3.shtml
Defoe, Daniel. A tour through the whole island of Great Britain: Divided into circuits or journeys. Printed for S. Birt, T. Osborne, 1748. P. 119.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911. “Wool, worsted and woollen manufactures.” Online at http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Wool,_worsted_and_woollen_manufactures
Garnett, Breedge. “Esholt: A suitable case for treatment!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_esholt_1.shtml
Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.
James, John. Continuation and Additions to the History of Bradford, and Its Parish. 1866.
James, John. History of the Worsted Manufacture in England: From the Earliest Times; with Introductory Notices of the Manufacture Among the Ancient Nations, and During the Middle Ages. First published in 1857. Reprint: Routledge, 1968.
James, John. The History and Topography of Bradford, (in the County of York). 1841. Quoted in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877. Vol 2.
Lawler, Eddie. “Bradford Beck” (song.) Online at: http://www.eddie-lawler.co.uk/
Leland, John. Itinerary. First published approx. 1846. This modernized translation is quoted in: Yorkshire, Past and Present , by Thomas Baines, 1877, page 261.
Royal Commission (UK). The Pollution of Rivers. 1867.
Shaw, Dave. “Saltaire: A successful industrial township.” Part of “The Industrial Revolution and its social consequences.” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/bradford/article_1.shtml
Skempton, Sir Alec, Ed. The Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1. Everyman Publishers plc in assoc. with English Heritage, London, 2001. ISBN 1-84159-047-9
Testimony of Angus Reach. Originally published in The Morning Chronicle (1849). Reprinted in Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849-1851. J. Ginswick, Ed. Routledge, 1983. P. 175.
Tucker, Irwin St. John. A History of Imperialism. Published by Rand School of Social Science, New York, 1920.
Turner, J Horsfall. Ancient Bingley, or, Bingley, Its History and Scenery. Thomas Harrison and Sons, Bingley, Yorks, 1897.
Wood, Janet. “Hidden Water” (Song.) from Bradford: The Musical. Performed at the 2005 Bradford Festival.
Yorkshire History Pages, The. “West Yorkshire: Leeds and Bradford History.” Online at: http://www.northeastengland.talktalk.net/WestYorkshire.htm#BRADFORD
"Address before the National association of wool manufacturers, at the first annual meeting in Philadelphia, Sept. 6, 1865,” by John L Hayes, Secretary. Published by John Wilson and Sons, Cambridge, MA, 1865. Online at http://www.archive.org/stream/addressbeforenat00hayeiala/addressbeforenat00hayeiala_djvu.txt
“Inquisition Post Mortem, on the death of Henry De Laci the last Earl of Lincoln, 1311, 5th Edward II” reproduced in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877, Vol 2. P. 251
“Sanitary Report by Mr. Smith of Deanston, 1837.” Referenced in Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.
Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877.
City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. “Bradford’s History.” Online at: http://www.bradford.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/hobbies_and_interests/bradfords_history.htm
Clapp, B.W. An Environmental History of Britain. London, 1994.
Crosier, Pete. “The Victorian way of...death!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_death_3.shtml
Defoe, Daniel. A tour through the whole island of Great Britain: Divided into circuits or journeys. Printed for S. Birt, T. Osborne, 1748. P. 119.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911. “Wool, worsted and woollen manufactures.” Online at http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Wool,_worsted_and_woollen_manufactures
Garnett, Breedge. “Esholt: A suitable case for treatment!” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/hidden_esholt_1.shtml
Ginswick, Jules, Ed. Labor and the Poor in England and Wales: 1849-1851. Vol. 1. Routledge, 1983.
James, John. Continuation and Additions to the History of Bradford, and Its Parish. 1866.
James, John. History of the Worsted Manufacture in England: From the Earliest Times; with Introductory Notices of the Manufacture Among the Ancient Nations, and During the Middle Ages. First published in 1857. Reprint: Routledge, 1968.
James, John. The History and Topography of Bradford, (in the County of York). 1841. Quoted in: Baines, Thomas. Yorkshire, Past and Present. 1877. Vol 2.
Lawler, Eddie. “Bradford Beck” (song.) Online at: http://www.eddie-lawler.co.uk/
Leland, John. Itinerary. First published approx. 1846. This modernized translation is quoted in: Yorkshire, Past and Present , by Thomas Baines, 1877, page 261.
Royal Commission (UK). The Pollution of Rivers. 1867.
Shaw, Dave. “Saltaire: A successful industrial township.” Part of “The Industrial Revolution and its social consequences.” BBC. Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/bradford/article_1.shtml
Skempton, Sir Alec, Ed. The Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1. Everyman Publishers plc in assoc. with English Heritage, London, 2001. ISBN 1-84159-047-9
Testimony of Angus Reach. Originally published in The Morning Chronicle (1849). Reprinted in Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849-1851. J. Ginswick, Ed. Routledge, 1983. P. 175.
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