Cromford, Derbyshire

 

Mill town, pig town

The idea that a factory town need consist simply of rows of small, unsanitary houses accommodating the workforce of a vast textile mill is belied in Cromford. The attractive workers’ houses in my previous post showed by their upper-floor workshops that not everyone worked in the mill. But structures nearby point in addition to activities still further from the industrial. Pig-keeping was familiar to farm workers in villages, but Cromford too has its share of pigsties, urban porcine dwellings near the backs of workers’ houses very close to the middle of the town. There are allotments and barns not far away, signalling that growing or raising your own food was something available to at least some of Cromford’s population.

Pigsties like this one are almost as substantially built as the nearby houses and have lasted well. They’re not used now, but in the 18th and 19th centuries would have provided a very welcome supplement to the basic working-class diet, especially as the pig will yield products such as bacon that can be cured so that it will keep for some time. When, a young newly married woman in rural Lincolnshire, my mother kept a pig for a few years, she welcomed the rich bounty – not just the various joints of pork, but also bacon, chops, sausages, pork pies, and recherché local delicacies such haslet.

I’m not pretending that life for Richard Arkwright’s employees and their families wasn’t hard. Much of their lives would have been spent in the mill, while other family members might have worked at home at a loom or toiled in garden or smallholding, or in the endless round of ‘women’s work’ that running even a small 18th- or 19th-century home entailed. But it wasn’t all ‘dark satanic mills’ for everyone, as this modest structure confirms.