John Glithero brought his model of Mellor Mill down to show the volunteers. It demonstrates how water power and steam engines powered the machinery. Chicken drumsticks served, too.

Bob Humphrey-Taylor

STORM Gathers in Mellor!

Mellor Archaeological Trust (MAT) is the lead organisation in the UK involved in a Europe wide initiative to reduce the impact of climate change, natural hazards and human actions on heritage. The project, called STORM (Safeguarding Cultural Heritage through Technical and Organisational Resources Management), involves the use of predictive models and non-destructive methods of survey and diagnosis to predict environmental changes and to reveal the threats and conditions that may damage our cultural heritage sites. The budget for the project is 7.2 million Euros. It brings together partners from Italy, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

The steam engine at Queen Street Mill museum, Burnley. This is the only working steam-powered weaving mill left in Europe. Its a site of inter-national importance and a Grade 1 listed building. Lancashire County Council are proposing to close it from April 2016

As part of a proposed budget Lancashire County Council are planning the closure of five museums in the county, from April 1st 2016. The money saved by the proposed closure is part of planned saving of £65m by the authority of the next two years. The council’s budget also proposes axing the Heritage and Arts Service, which promotes museum and library collections, from April 2016, and the Lancashire Historic Environment Service. This will leave the county without any controls over archaeology threatened by development, just as happened in Liverpool between 2011 and 2014. Archaeology is a non-renewable resource. If this proposal goes ahead archaeological sites will be lost without any record and artefacts destroyed.

James Watt, the Industrial Revolution and water power

On June 3rd 2015 John Hearle responded, via a letter in the Observer, to an earlier article written by David McKie, Guardian Science Editor, this discussed the role of James Watts' inventions in driving the Industrial Revolution.

John's letter, which was edited when published in the Observer, appears below. This is followed by two links, one  to McKie's original article, the other to the letters in response, including that of John's.

John W S Hearle                                            June 3, 2015

Editor

The Observer

James Watt’ s  steam engine had a major impact on what the historian, G M Trevelyan described as “the great changes in man’s command over nature and manner of life, which began in England in the reign of George III”. For example in transport, it began the change from horses and bullocks. However, it is, at most, half-truths to say that “the cotton industry was transformed” and that “there was a strict limit to the number of factories you could build on the banks of fast-flowing rivers”.  Steam power did change where textile manufacturing was located in the 19th century, but the transformation of the textile industries was well under way in the 1780s.Water power would have continued to power the growth of the industry.