Sunny Bank Mills Audio Walk

17 ECHOES

An audio walk telling the curious tales of a former worsted wool mill.

Penny Hole

This little passageway was known as a penny hole of a penny oil in my bad Yorkshire accent. If a worker was late for work if, the main gates would have been closed and they would have been forced to go through this passageway and their name written in a book and a penny would be docked from their pay. Hence the name, penny hole.

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Strange Mirrors

There are all sorts of funny things hanging off the walls of these mill. Up above you, you'll see an old angled mirror and for years we never knew what this was for, until one day an old employee stopped me in the street and said “John, John! I remembered what that old mirror was for!” The problem was that mirror reflects something that has since been knocked down. It was actually for the engineer to sit in his office and look over the buildings into the mirror, and see the reflection of the old chimney, the old brick chimney. And the colour of the smoke coming out of that chimney would tell him how well the boiler was running.

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Sunny Bank House / Our Margaret

The old Mill Manager's house.

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Coal pits

The deep dark pits you see beside you were actually coalpits to feed the boilers which created the steam to drive the Mills. my father used to say there was coal everywhere around this mill and it was used right up until the early sixties when my grandfather installed the first oil fired boiler. If you look deep down into the bottom of the pit you'll of see a sort of Archimedes screw and this was used to draw the coal towards the boiler. every now and again it used to get and blocked apparently it was a terrible job for some poor worker to climb down the ladder and dig out!

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Rebar "Sculpture"

This large tangle of metal that looks like a large pile of rusting spaghetti actually came from the building that once stood over a dam in the middle the Weaver's yard, the car park in front of you. The reinforcement bar was used to strengthen the concrete structure and when the building was demolished in 2020, the demolition crew, munching through the concrete like it was meringue, left clumps, tangles of this metal around the demolition site. And we asked to keep one of these clumps as a momento of what once stood here but also to remind us that anyone can become an artist, the demolition driver became an accidental sculptor that day, and if you look, you can find art anywhere, if you look at it in the right way.

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The Colonnade

The 12 columns and the concrete floor are all that remain of the doubling and twisting departments and weaving sheds that once stood in what is now the weaver’s yard.
You can see the original floor levels of the concrete floor and the gravel sunken car park was actually a reservoir on top of which stood the wet scouring and dying department and the tarmac hill that leads down to the road was a large finishing department where the cloth was dried and pressed before going to the warehouse, which is now the art gallery. The design and shape of these buildings were very specific to the function that they served and we were unable to reuse them, so they were demolished in 2020. They revealed for the 1st time in hundreds of years buildings that had been hidden and inaccessible, for example the old woollen which is now a vibrant cultural events space. The weavers’s lawn, once home to hundreds of clattering looms is now a peaceful place to meet, and, an integral part bringing the mills back to life.

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1912 Mill

The tall 1912 mill was constructed in the same year that Titanic sank. It was built by the then owner of the mills Edwin Woodhouse. It was built as a spinning mill. He had previously constructed a spinning mill in 1882 which is situated within the heart of the mills, but by 1912 the weaving technology had improved to such an extent that his original spinning Mill no longer had the capacity to keep up with looms, hence he had to build a completely separate mill for his new spinning equipment. Shortly after building the 1912 mill he decided to sell a firm, as he had 3 daughters and no sons an hence no-one to hand the business on to. In 1913 at the age of 80 he sold the firm to the Ives family.

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Mangle

Behind the glass screen is a mangle. This machine was in the scouring department, that's the department where the cloth was washed. After washing we had to extract the moisture from the cloth, so the cloth was passed through the mangle and squeezed between the 2 rollers. after it went through the mangle the cloth was pulled open and went through the tenter machine. The tenter had sharp hooks each side to hold the cloth open to it dry at a set at width. This is of course where the famous expression to be on tenter hooks comes from.

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Fires at Sunny Bank Mills

Sunny bank Mills has known many fires over the years, including one in 1944, in this very building, the Twisting Gallery and you can still see the stone wall to your right marked orange from the heat. More recently, in 2008, the day before the manufacturing company was to be sold, a spark created by the scrap men as they cut out an old machine, had fallen between the floorboards and set alight some dry combustible material. It was the sprinklers that put out the fire and saved over a million pounds worth of luxury wool cloth that formed a large part of that sale.

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Protection from fire at Sunny Bank Mills

The tangle of red pipes and valves that can be seen through the glass panel here is a main sprinkle valve, 1 of 4 around the mill that provides vital protection to all the buildings action and is fed from the large dam that sits behind the 1912 mill.

Although this is a new head, installed in 2020, the original system was installed in the mid 50s. Before that the mill had its own fire engine, and a fire department and there were water pipes running around the mill with hoses attached, ready for any fires.

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Dye Garden

The dye garden contains a small botanical collection of plant were used by our forefathers for dyeing cloth. Many plants were used throughout the British Isles and here are some of the most important. Different parts of the plant would be used for dyeing. Sometimes, it's roots, the bark, the leaves or the flowers. Some plants had to be harvested at a particular time of year to get the best use of colour from the plant. Among the most important plants we have here are madder, which used the roots to obtain a red shade, Weld which was used to dye yellow or green, and woad which was used to dye blue. There were great fields of woad down in Essex and Sussex. You might have heard of the expression Lavenham Blue which comes from the village of the same name down there, famous for its growing of woad. the parts of a plant would be typically chopped up and mashed then heated in water to extract the colour from the plant matter to obtain the dye liquor. Then a mordant would be added to the to the cloth, the mordant would help fix the colour from the dye liquor onto the cloth.

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Memorial Benches

The pair at the pair of memorial benches were erected to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a dreadful and tragic event here at Sunny bank Mills. inspector Barry Taylor and Ian Riley were brutally murdered on the night of February 15th, 1970, by George Adamson. Adamson had come to the mill late at night with the intention of blowing open the mill safe and stealing some cash. ian Riley was the night watchman that evening and he was tragically shot by Adamson as he forcefully entered the mill. inspector Barry Taylor was called down to the incident and as he scaled the gate into the main mill yard he too was gunned down by Adamson. Adamson went on the run, and after a 3-day manhunt the police thankfully caught up with him in Colne and captured him. he was subsequently sentence for his crimes.

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Cog Wheel

The rusty cog half buried in the ground is in fact a piece of line shafting. line shafting was a system of connecting all machines back to the engines which drove the mill. It was a serious of pulleys, shafts, ropes and belts connected to every single machine, which run back to the to the engine. the mill had 2 engines. 1 was 300 horsepower and the other was 400 horsepower. and if you walk back towards the Spinning Mill you can see a large arched opening in the side of the building, that's where the flywheel of one of the engines actually sat, and above the arched opening you can see some square metal casting's and that's where the line shafts driven by the engine would enter the building.

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Mill Chimney

The tall brick structure in the corner is what's left of the old mill chimney. This is actually the 2nd chimney; it was about 180' high and was demolished in the early eighties because it had structural problems. In fact, you can still see a big crack in the ashlar stone there in front of you. So, when they demolished it, they the punched a hole in the bottom of the chimney and you can just see and where the hole was, and they then started at the top dismantling the bricks and though them down the chimney itself, and all bricks tumbled down to the bottom where they could gather them up and cart them off. Just to the side of the chimney you can see still a pulley wheel with a chain and if you look at the bottom of chain you can see a baffle, and this was how they could control the draw of the flue. The flu run underground all away from the boiler house halfway down the mill yard the chimney here. The 3rd and final mill chimney is actually a steel one located down by the boiler house, which you can still see today.

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The rusty Loom

This large rusting machine is called a loom, used to weave wool yarn into cloth. Yorkshire’s mills were full of looms like this, and they were one of the main reasons for its success as a textile powerhouse. This particular one is hattersley's standard loom, 1st introduced in 1921. George Hattersley and Sons were from Keithley and in 1834, were responsible for the first automated power loom. In 1867, they introduced the dobby, the contraption that sits above the loom itself. By using intricate networks of wires connected to shafts, the dobby allowed much more complicated designs to be created. The loom ran at 56 picks per minute, taking about 2 days to weave a 60-metre piece of cloth. By 2008, the last year of manufacturing here, the dornier rapier looms we were using ran at 600 picks per minute and took just under 2 hours to weave that same length of cloth. However, we kept using this loom right until 2008, precisely because it ran more slowly. It was used in the design department where the designers could more easily see and alter the designs as they went along.

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Rana Plaza Sculpture

Remember Rana Plaza, a sculpture by Meea may Symonds to commemorate the Rana Plaza disaster. On the 24 th April 2013, an eight-storey clothing factory called Rana Plaza collapsed, in Dakar, Bangladesh, killing 1,100 people and injuring 2500 more, often with lifelong injuries. The rana plaza building contained 5 clothing factories with 4000 workers producing the cheap, fast fashion that we see on out high streets, The building had not been designed for industry, it had in fact been made for shops and offices. Furthermore it had 4 stories added to the original building without the correct permits. The structural collapse of Rana Plaza was a result of the failures of the fast fashion industry, and it was those at the bottom of the supply chain that paid the price and were killed and injured that day. Remember Rana Plaza was made to commemorate those that died that day but also to reignite debate around the causes of this tragic event and to make us reflect on what has and what hasn’t changed in the last ten years. What are you wearing now? Do you know where your clothes have come from? Have those that made them been treated in the right way? This sculpture by ‘meea’ may Symonds merges both concrete and textiles, the core materials that envelope this historic tragedy and it considers the relationship between the factories’ material foundations and the impact on the lives of those that ultimately lay trapped between them. It was commissioned by Sunny Bank Mills and is now a permanent installation on this site, the Weavers’ Lawn.

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Fethera sheep Sculpture

Fethera, a sculpture by Dave Young and Anne Gaffikin This magnificent 12 foot high by 15 foot high sheep that looks contentedly over the wall was originally commissioned by Artichoke, for herd which was part of a year long festival of music in Kirklees in 2023. There were 23 sheep made and it was our friends at Project Farsley who spotted the opportunity that Artichoke were looking for permanent homes for these very special sheep and they asked us if we would help bring one to Farsley. Well, we love sheep at sunny bank mills because we worked with wool for over 150 years turning it into wool cloth so we decided to bring two of the sheep to the mills and now Fethera and her friend Covero are part of the Sunny bank mills sculpture trail which we will develop over the coming years. We love how Dave Young and anne gaffikin have reused old bits of metal and old toys and bits wood to make these sculptures and this chimes perfectly with what we are trying to do at Sunny Bank Mills, reusing these old buildings for a new purpose. The names of the sheep, Fethera and Covero are inspired by Shepherds up in Swaledale used to count their sheep. They didn’t just use numbers, 1 to 20, they had their own counting system that went like this; Yan, tan, TetherA, Pethera, Pimp, Sethera, Lethera, hovera, Covera, Dik Yan a dik, tan a dik, Tethera a dik, Pethera a dik, Bumfit, Yan a bumfit, tan a bumfit, Tethera bumfit, Pethera bumfit, Figgit And when they got to number 20, Figgit, they would pass a stone from one hand to the next and start again, counting one to twenty. So using this system we have number 4 and number 9 from this flock. Now, see if you can find covero hiding in the woodland?

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