Savile Town Marina, Dewsbury, South Yorkshire

As I started this, I heard once more the sounds of gunshot or similar, and hopped up to peer out the window to see showers of fireworks bursting over the area immediately to the north. I had noticed earlier in the week on the calendar that this month is when the Jews and the Moslems celebrate their New Year, and rechecking again tonight, I see that this annual celebration was on 21 September, and no doubt most folk of that persuasion find the weekend a more practical time to let off crackers. Problem solved: the gunshot is to celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Al Hijira. 

For us today we were more intent on catching up with the elections in New Zealand and spent some time during the morning “chatting” on Whatsapp with our youngest as the results unfolded. Olly gave us a link to watch the results live and we sat in the car at lunch time with the iPad linked to the internet through the hotspot dongle, and watched the horror. It seems that elections throughout the Western World these days are all so very close, which makes for nail biting moments and governments that are too fragile to make real changes. We will certainly be watching the progress of how a parliament is patched together over the coming days.

Despite our distraction, we set off into the city of Leeds to explore further, today initially targeting the Leeds Industrial Museum located on the south west edge of the city beside the River Aire. Armley Mill was once the largest woollen mill in the world, even operating in a relatively primitive form as far back as the middle of the 16^th century. Later records show that in 1707 that here was a fulling mill, “fulling” being the process of removing oils, dirt and other impurities of mainly woollen cloth, by pounding the cloth with large hammers in pits filled with a mixture of water, urine and “fullers earth”  causing the fibres to mat or felt together. By 1788 Armley had five waterwheels powering eighteen fulling stocks, as well as a corn mill. 

In 1788 Colonel Thomas Lloyd, a prosperous Leeds cloth merchant, bought Armley Mills, rebuilt it then leased it to two brothers, Israel and John Burrows. In 1804 Benjamin Gott bought the mill and then had to rebuild just one year later after a fire, and it is this structure built from fireproof materials, using brick and iron wherever possible, that still stands today and houses the museum.

Benjamin died in 1840 but his sons took over and they moved with the times, introducing the use of steam engines to replace the waterwheels, a system which continued on for the next twenty years. 

By the end of the century, Armley Mills was occupied by several tenants, although by 1907 the woollen clothing manufacturers Bentley and Tempest were the sole occupiers and remained so until finally closing in 1971. The Leeds City Council bought the site and opened the museum in 1982.

Apart from the mill machinery still used for demonstrate purposes and spinning of wool for Hainsworth in specialist boutique quantities, there is a wonderful exhibition all about the tailoring business, all part of the textile industry.

The tailoring industry grew at such a rate that from 1856, when John Barran opened his first wholesale clothing factory, to 1881, twenty other wholesale factories had opened. With the exception of one factory there was no more than a five minute walk between all of them. In 1890 there were 15,000 people in Leeds producing five million garments per year, the majority of which were suits and coats for men and boys. 

I was surprised to learn of the role that the Leeds textile industry had in the manufacture of uniforms for all those who took part in the First World War, from the soldiers and officers uniforms, demob suits for the surviving soldiers at the end of the war to the overalls worn by the women who worked in the munitions factories which took over so much of the industrial space available in the day. 

At its height the Leeds tailoring industry employed a vast number of people in the city. It is thought that in the 1940s and 1950s, one in every three working women were employed in this business. Leeds tailors produced nearly one in every two suits worn by British men.

The museum also celebrates the role Leeds played in the printing and film industries, and here one can relax in the old style cinema and watch vintage “Mary Poppins”.  

It really is an excellent museum but I suspect rather short of funds. While there are some wonderfully informative exhibitions spread over the three floors of the mill, and the three employees did everything to make our visit memorable, I am sure the curators would be delighted to receive a lottery grant or an outrageous donation from some far off philanthropist.

From here we drove into the city, hoping to find a park near Granary Wharf, the area along both sides of the River Aire and the Leeds Liverpool Canal, formerly a derelict relic of the industrial days. Now there are wonderful new apartments, cafes, bars and restaurants as well as riverside walkways, and easy access up into the city streets, today vibrant with the weekend crowds. We found our way through the smart shopping mall of Trinity Leeds, through the crowds of happy shoppers and the buskers to the Corn Exchange which we had missed the other day, a fact that had not unduly bothered us.

What a bonus to discover it today, when it was full of folk and as busy as it must have been when it operated as the centre of the trade for corn, wheat, beans, barley, peas, hops, seeds, oil cake and flour after it was built in 1863. It was built by the same Cuthbert Broderick who had built the Town Hall just up the road and is really quite wonderful inside as well as being relatively pleasing to the eye from outside. Speciality shops created new life for the Exchange in 1985, and then it was refurbished and reopened again in 2008 with a new batch of retailers. Today it was hosting a Rum Festival and there was an absolute buzz of ticket holders down in the open basement; no doubt the festivities will have intensified as the hours have passed.

We headed back to the car a couple of hours before our parking ticket was due to expire, and were home early enough to pour over our maps and camping directories with a glass of wine in hand, and agree on a general direction for the next move, but no more. No matter, we still have several days here in Savile Town.