The museum was formed from three weavers’ cottages that had been knocked together. Not having been a very good student of history I didn’t know what a weaver’s cottage was, but it didn’t take me long for my interest to become thoroughly piqued: my day job is all about technology, and the museum was all about industrial history.
Ann introduced us to her colleague, a fellow volunteer, who was also called Ann.
“All my family come from around this area” said Bob, not wasting a moment to learn more about the area. Sarah had known Bob and his partner Miriam since she was little; they were close friends of her family from when they lived in Manchester. Not only was this trip an opportunity to do a ‘G’ and visit Golcar, but it was also an opportunity to visit them both and to catch up.
“You remember my mother?!” exclaimed Bob after chatting with one of the Ann’s for a few minutes. Bob had been recently doing a lot of research into his family history. In some respects, Bob’s trip to Golcar was a lot more significant than my own. I had no reason to visit the town other than it began with a letter, whereas Bob’s identity seemed to be bound closely to the valley.
A neat graphic charted the history of the property, showing how it was divided and subdivided and occupied by different families. A sign, entitled ‘a family weaving business’ offered some useful background information: “Cloth makers James and Sally Pearson built two cottages here at Cliffe Ash in the early 1840s. By 1845, two more cottages had been added and the row was called Spring Rock. The four homes housed textile workers until the early part of the 20th century”.
I chatted with the first Ann. The entire area was defined by the wool and textile industry, which had all but disappeared. Ann’s woollen shawl wasn’t produced from a mill in Yorkshire. Instead, it was bought from Primark, made in China and was probably polyester. Ann had been a mature student, studied science, technology and engineering in her 40s. Her dissertation was about the architecture of the textile industry.
After walking through the length of the ground floor, we found ourselves in one of the main exhibition rooms: a kitchen. There was a range that had been recently lit, a couple of tables, and a frame on which you could hang things using tenterhooks, used for the stretching of woollen cloth. On the tables were period items; jugs, pots and bowls. There was a room at the back of the kitchen which contained washing paraphernalia: a mangle, a bucket, and a device which was used to agitate your laundry. Our attention was drawn to a couple of framed pieces of needlework, which were made by girls and young women to demonstrate their skills.
A sign directed us upstairs towards the 1840s bedroom, which contained period furniture: a substantial chair, a bed, a dresser, and a spinning wheel. Ann told us something else about the bedroom: it had been used for drinking when the building was taken over by the Golcar Socialist Club. Ann told us about the hard drinking Colne Valley MP, Victor Grayson, a skilled orator who mysteriously disappeared in 1920.
There was another room at the top of the building. I was struck by two things: the light streaming in through the windows, and two large looms.
“Everyone does that” said Ann, who saw me walk towards the window.
I wanted to catch a glimpse of the surrounding countryside, to learn more about the valley. I wanted to see what the weavers saw. “When we first opened, we had the looms directly next to the windows as they would have been, so there would be as much light as possible for the weavers to work, but then visitors would move between the looms to look out of the window, so we moved them to where they are now” explained Ann.
It was only then that I noticed the size of the windows. They were different to other windows I had seen in buildings of a similar age. They were massive; the windows frames hewn from stone. Behind me were two massive wooden framed weaving looms. A volunteer demonstrated how they worked.
Bob was fascinated by its operation, how the shuttle moved back and forth, and told us how the mechanism changed to create different patterns in the material.
“Jacquard” Bob said, referring to the Frenchman, Joseph Jacquard, who had once visited Huddersfield.
I knew of Jacquard through the history of computing. Jacquard invented a system where looms could be programmed using sets of abstract cards that could be used to realise physical cloth that contained complex repeating patterns.
The final room was different to the rest. Rather than focusing on spinning and weaving, it was all about shoemaking. The weavers of Yorkshire, like textile workers in Lancashire, wore clogs. After the death of one of the last clog makers, the entire contents of a cobblers, including stock, tools, and materials were moved to the museum to be preserved. Visitors could sit on a bench and try on pairs of clogs in different sizes. Our visit to the museum ended with a short walk through a café and gift shop, where Bob continued to chat with the two volunteers.
Our journey to Golcar had been a journey through personal and industrial time. It began at the town of Macclesfield, spending the night at Miriam and Bob’s house. Bob explained that Macclesfield used to be a famous silk town, but I only know it as an anonymous train station that I always used to pass on the way to Manchester. Macclesfield is a part of the North West that I didn’t know anything about, but in this instance, the notion of the place was secondary: it was friendships and shared personal histories that mattered. Sarah shared stories and greetings from her parents, and Miriam and Bob gave us a tour of a well-tended garden that overlooked a quiet canal; an important echo of industrial heritage that we were only just starting to explore.
When Bob had heard we were visiting Golcar, he was very happy to help. He prepared us a printed information pack entitled ‘Golcar: a West Yorkshire village’. His pack introduced the Colne Valley and highlighted sights, such as the village church, the valley museum and a café. A very concise history referenced wool, the building of canals and industrialisation. Bob also offered to guide us from their home in Macclesfield to Golcar, which was really helpful, since I had no idea how to get there.
On the morning of our drive to Golcar, we followed Bob and Miriam in their car. Bob’s route took us to a place called Standedge which is the site of a series of canal tunnels connecting West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. We stopped at Standedge visitor’s centre, a former warehouse, now a museum.
We wandered around the visitor centre for around half an hour, looking at the various exhibits; a set of display boards that explained the term ‘legging it’, and revealed that Standedge tunnel was ‘the highest, longest and deepest canal tunnel in Britain’ and a series of wooden life size cut out characters who played a significant role in its construction. One board explained that its construction began in 1794 while it opened in 1811. “The railways” said Bob, reflecting on its closure in 1944. The tunnel was restored and reopened in 2001, and is now open to canal tourists.
Just as Sarah was catching up with Miriam and Bob, I had the opportunity to catch up with one of my old friends: Dave. I met Dave on the first day of university at a cheese and wine party. I remember Dave because I was envious of the way that he could seemingly talk to anyone and the fact that he had a bold plan, which was to liberate some of the free wine and take it to the lake side, and continue drinking. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I think I was party to his scheme. There is something else that I need to mention about Dave. Just as Bob had a connection to Golcar, Dave was, more or less, a local: he was from Huddersfield.
We met Dave in the Golcar Liberal Club, a working men’s club. The club was almost empty, except for a single family celebrating a birthday. A huge television on a back wall displayed an ignored football match and two bored barmaids chatted with each other. A flyer on our table suggested that there would be a club singer performing during the evening. Later on that evening two local lads started playing pool at a table that was just behind us.
Dave lived on the opposite side of Huddersfield, but had cycled for over an hour from Halifax, which was where he seemed to be spending most of his time. I asked Dave what it is like around Huddersfield.
“You look around you and you see history everywhere; it’s just there. You see it when cycling around, next to the canal and going into the different parts of the town. You’ve can’t escape it. It surrounds you. It’s everywhere, and you’re a part of it too. You see that parts of this area were once really very wealthy, because of the industry, because of what this area used to mean”.
After an hour or so, we invite Dave over for dinner. We were staying in a small house situated two hundred metres away from the Colne Valley Museum. Our house had been built on a steep hill. The bottom floor contained a kitchen and a living room, and access to a garden. The ground floor contained a single bedroom dominated by a series of substantial windows, like the windows that I had seen in the museum. Although it had a high ceiling, it didn’t seem to be large enough to have once accommodated a loom, but it was certainly a place where someone worked. Perhaps it used to be a finisher’s cottage; a place where fine detail to cloth was added.
The house was dwarfed by the adjacent building, which appeared to be a former industrial building, perhaps a mill. There was one main tell-tale sign of its former use: an external beam that was used to haul materials up from the ground level and into the building for processing.
I ask Dave about what he was doing in Halifax. Dave was between jobs having recently returned to the UK from a university in central Europe. He was working on a personal research project that was connected to his doctoral studies. Dave has interests in philosophy, politics, sociology, economics and computing. He connects these subject together by writing computer simulations and studying the emerging patterns. Writing simulations, or any types of software forces you to really think about your assumptions. If you’re using a computer to simulate anything, the computer becomes a philosophical tool because you need to define everything that the computer does. In some respects, you can describe a whole universe within a computer and define the laws that govern that universe. Dave cycles to a well-known pub chain in the morning, orders a coffee and gets to work on his simulations. He says it suits him: it is warm, he’s not disturbed, and the coffee is cheap.
The discussion moved onto politics and the debates regarding the European Union, and I sensed that Dave had different views to many members of his immediate family. One of the last things that I remember from our discussions was his point that it is important not to condemn those who have different perspectives, but to understand.
Dave left our weavers cottage at around 11; he had a long ride home in the cold but he didn’t seem to mind. It looked like he was used it. He donned a waterproof jacket, turned on his lights, unchained his bike and cycled to the centre of Golcar and followed a road that travelled downwards to the centre of Huddersfield.
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We found some time to walk around the village, which didn’t take us very long. The heart of the village seemed to be a road called Town End which contained a library, a post office, a hairdressers, a tanning salon, a small supermarket and what appeared to be a wine bar. As I walked, I looked upwards, towards the windows and again saw evidence of distant industry.
A walk took us to a closed pub and a small deserted industrial estate that contained a brewery. We retraced our steps, found another pub, and soon discovered a narrow footpath. We nodded at dog walkers as we made our way to an unknown destination, and I looked around, gradually falling into my own thoughts about what it would be like to live in one of those weavers houses. The footpath emerged in a part of the village that felt unrecognisable from the Golcar of Town End.
We found ourselves in a version of Golcar that belonged to the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties; streets with cul-de-sacs and closes, filled with simple box-shaped detached houses with integral garages, and homes that an estate agent might describe as ‘alpine bungalows’. I felt unnerved and disorientated. In my mind, Town End gave Golcar its sense of place, whereas its estates reminded me of the time I spent in a similar sized village in rural East Anglia. Somehow, time and architecture had collapsed space and distance through childhood memories.
Whilst Golcar is its very own place, every place exists within its own geographical context which deserves exploration. We had a choice; we could either head into the metropolis of Huddersfield, or follow further footpaths to leave the town and into the next village.
The following day we decided to head to Slaithwaite, a village to the west of Golcar. We began from our weavers cottage and walked down an adjacent snicket, twintern, or passage and onto a road that roughly followed the course of the river and the railway line. As we walked, I started to play a simple game with myself called: ‘spot the weavers cottage’. It was a very easy game to play; stone houses with large sets of upper windows overlooking the Colne valley could be easily found along the road to Slaithwaite.
I liked Slaithwaite. I like the stone uniformity of its buildings and the way that stone shop fronts offered visitors an assortment of useful establishments: cafés, butchers, and newsagents. The village was dominated by what was called the ‘Globe Worsted Mill’; an imposing monument to the industrial revolution which sat ominously in the middle of the village, its location dictated by the river and connected by canal. The mill opened between 1887 and 1889, and closed in 2004. I later read somewhere that it might become a technology and innovation centre with a connection to the nearby Huddersfield University, leading to a delicious play on words: the establishment of a Sili-Colne valley.
We discovered further abandoned mill buildings in Slaithwaite; industrial buildings that could be described as a five storey wall of windows, like the weavers cottages, expressly designed to let in the light. Some of those windows had been bricked up, others had been smashed. Dark streaks ran from the top to the bottom of the building, following the path of downpipes. I didn’t feel sad looking at these buildings. Instead, I felt curiosity: what stories emerged from those buildings, and a curiosity about what those buildings would or could become.
On the way back to Golcar, we stopped in a local pub called The Swan for a couple of pints. The Swan felt timeless. It had two bars; a saloon bar and a lounge bar. Musical hall era posters adorned the walls. One advertised ‘five Braemar Pipers’ and ‘eight dancing lovelies’. An extended family came and sat down for an afternoon pint; grandparents, parents and children all occupying a set of tables.
We left the following morning. It had snowed heavily overnight. We had opened the curtains and white night blazed through the windows of our weavers cottage. Clouds hung low in the sky threatening further snow, but it was clear that it was melting quickly. We loaded the car, and followed the snow to the motorway, where it disappeared.
This trip had a slightly different feel to the others. Golcar was Miriam and Bob, and Golcar was Dave. It was a trip that seemed to be less about place and more about people.
I liked Golcar. Perhaps it was the light, the large windows. I like that it was idiosyncratic. I liked that there were wine bars and closed pubs, weavers’ cottages and alpine bungalows. I liked the friendliness of all the volunteers who all seemed to be called Ann. I liked that their museum seemed to be saying: “this is Golcar; it’s a small place, but what happened in these valleys was important for a time, and this is a part of us”.
