Before we were here – The story of Generator Royal Mills
We don’t often stop to think about the buildings we work in. They’re just there – walls, floors, desks and internet. But for our Generator locations these spaces have a long and rich history; they’ve seen different kinds of work, people, and purpose over time.
For both Royal Mills and the Manchester Town Hall Extension, Manchester has shaped the buildings as much as they have shaped the city itself.
Ancoats: Royal Mills
Ancoats was the world’s first true ‘Industrial suburb’, emerging in the early decades of the 19th century. This was a time when Manchester was booming thanks to its textile industries, establishing itself as the cotton capital of the world.
The Mills which began to spring up in Ancoats were predominantly spinning mills – raw cotton went in, and cotton thread came out.
These factories, from 1800 onwards, used steam powered spinning mules to spin random threads of raw cotton, imported from the Americas, into continuous yarn, which was then sold to be woven into cloth.
First and foremost, I must set the record straight, our office in Ancoats, ‘Royal Mills’ is not Royal Mill, it’s in what was originally called Sedgewick Mill. So, from here on, I will refer to it as such.
Technically speaking Royal Mills, as it is now referred to, consists of 6 mills which form the McConnel and Kennedy Mill Complex. These were all renovated into a single mixed commercial, retail and residential complex in 2006 and branded as Royal Mills.
The entire complex was built, rebuilt, renovated and repurposed over a period of 200 years all beginning in 1798, when two Manchester industrialists John Kennedy and James McConnel Constructed Old Mill on the corner of Redhill Street and Henry Street.
Old Mill was rebuilt in 1912 confusingly as New Old Mill and then later became Royal Mill in 1942 after a royal visit from King George VI and his wife.
Sedgwick Mill, which is the large 8 story, 17 bay mill (in which Generator is located) was built between 1818 and 1820 making it the oldest and largest building remaining as a part of the complex.
Like the other Mills in the McConnel and Kennedy Complex and many others in Manchester, Sedgwick mill was a Cotton Mill. It housed a Massive 54 Horsepower Boulton and Watt Beam engine on its ground floor which then powered long spinning mules which would have stretched across the long factory floors of the building.
By the time Sedgewick Mill was built, McConnell and Kennedy were the largest single employer in the whole of Manchester with around 1500 workers. The area of Ancoats which was a of mills and houses held over one fifth of Manchester’s entire population!
Redhill street, the street our front entrance is on was described by the famous French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 as “… a place where some 1,500 workers, labouring, 69 hours a week, with an average wage of 11 shillings, and where three-quarters of the workers are women and children”.
Sedgwick Mill and its adjoining mills now stand as enduring symbols of Manchester’s transformation into the world’s first truly industrial city—a hub of textile innovation and economic expansion.
But behind their towering brick walls remains a more complex and sobering truth.
Manchester’s industrial growth was built not just on invention and entrepreneurship, but on inequality and exploitation. Thousands of men, women, and children worked in gruelling conditions, long hours in deafening, hazardous environments, often for very low wages.
During the completion of Sedgewick Mills, Manchester became the stage for one of the most significant, yet relatively unknown, episodes of political and social upheaval in British history—the Peterloo Massacre.
In response to low wages and the lack of political representation amid an early 19th-century economic downturn, around 60,000 workers gathered peacefully in St Peter’s Field, central Manchester. Their call for reform was met with brutal force as local yeomanry cavalry charged into the crowd, killing 18 people and injuring hundreds more.
This new class of extremely wealthy industrialists did come to adopt some level of social responsibility however, perhaps partly due to many of their relatively humble origins. The industrial figures of Ancoats such as McConnell, Kennedy and their neighbour to the north A & G Murray took what is seen today as a paternal approach to supporting the communities surrounding their mills. In fact, Ancoats was not even recognised by the local authorities during this period.
They patronised several educational and recreational institutions catering for their workers. This gave those who wouldn’t normally have access to formal education the ability to gain training and apprenticeships in engineering. In 1828 construction was finished on Ancoats Dispensary paid for through subscriptions by Factory Owners, this provided mill workers with a very basic form of free healthcare.
As with the rest of the British Empires growth, Manchester was too deeply tied to its colonial exploits and trade with the vast slave colonies of the Americas.
As two of the most prominent historians on Manchester mills point out, I. Miller and C. Wild, it’s remarkable that the principal source of Manchester’s wealth and emergence in the 19th century depended on a single plant grown thousands of miles away.
In fact, McConnell and Kennedy almost solely relied on one cotton plant known as Sea Island Cotton which had long silky fibres.
The vast majority of the Cotton which passed through Sedgewick and the surrounding mills (before the outbreak of the American Civil War) would have been picked by slaves in plantations across the Caribbean, South America and the American South.
The prosperity of Manchester’s mills was built on the back of this inhumanity and acknowledging this history forces us to confront these historical injustices.
During the completion of Sedgewick Mills, Manchester became the stage for one of the most significant, yet relatively unknown, episodes of political and social upheaval in British history—the Peterloo Massacre.
In response to low wages and the lack of political representation amid an early 19th-century economic downturn, around 60,000 workers gathered peacefully in St Peter’s Field, central Manchester to protest. Their call for reform was met with brutal force as local yeomanry cavalry charged into the crowd, killing 18 people and injuring hundreds more.
In the immediate aftermath the events of Peterloo lead too little to no change for the plight of Manchester working classes, but it marked moment of change symbolising a newfound sense of political agency in the workers of industrial Britain. It would ultimately take 13 years until the first reform act began the process of extending political representation for all and would not fully grant for another century.
As global trade picked up in the second half of the 20th century production moved to countries where there was cheaper labour. This, along with the introduction of new synthetic materials like polyester lead to the end of Manchester’s cotton textile industries.
Spinning ceased on the entire McConnel and Kennedy site in 1959, after which nearly all the machinery was the scrapped, and by the mid-1990s all the buildings of the complex became completely derelict.
Ancoats had been designated as conservation area in 1989 by Manchester City council this protected mills such as our very own Sedgewick mill. This also meant it took decades for Ancoats to be redeveloped as companies were more reluctant to commit to expensive restoration and preservation costs for the old crumbling buildings.
Now, however Ancoats is lucky to have the character of the old Mill buildings alongside the amenities and buzz of an urban village.
Once a dense collection of dirty, cramped houses for the poor and towering factories, then a derelict and dangerous fringe of the city centre Ancoats has now become an exclusive and expensive area. Dotted with expensive coffee shops and artisan bakeries, even more expensive restaurants its cobbled roads (tarmac until the 2000s) are now patrolled by runners and their pedigree dogs. One living in Ancoats in the 19th century or event in the 1990s and 2000s might find it hard to believe that Ancoats would eventually become consistently rated one of the coolest neighbourhoods (13th) in the world to live in by Time Out magazine.
Just six months ago, the Government announced plans to construct a cutting-edge digital AI campus across the Rochdale Canal, directly facing the former mills. A new technological revolution taking place meters away from where the industrial revolution took off.
Rory Felcey
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