Rubble At The Mill (Manchester) | Series 13 Episode 3 | Time Team

[Music] this is manchester city centre and behind all these posh shops lies a story that changed britain and the world and it's all down to this stuff cotton it's only just over 200 years ago that cotton cloth started to be manufactured in this country and manchester soon became the powerhouse and driving force behind the new cotton industry the building at the heart of this story lies here in the city centre and it revolutionized british society built in 1780 on this spot was the first cotton mill in manchester today it's buried under this car park and we've got just three days to locate and retrieve one of the most important historic sites in britain [Music] the late 1700s saw massive change in britain the development of steam engines meant the first use of huge machines these were particularly important to the rise of the cotton mills manchester was at the forefront of this change its very first cotton mill was built on this site in 1780 by entrepreneur richard arkwright his mill housed steam technology way ahead of its time not that you'd know it today francis if there was a mill here they've managed to wipe out every single piece of evidence of it well not actually tony behind you there you can see you've got cobbles now i think that was the surface of the yard that went outside the mill that's certainly early 19th century cobbles so presumably then mike the front of the mill was run along those cobbles yes francis we've actually got a number of maps this is one from 1831 and it shows the mills rectangular building with a reservoir below it and then the cobbles running in between if we know that then why are we bothering to dig the side because although this is a factory that's been used for 150 years tony we don't know how the mill was laid out we don't know how it develops but digging one rectangular building isn't going to take three days not one building it's been rebuilt a number of times burnt down in the 1850s for instance so how are we going to locate it well you see we've had a bit of a deliberation about this the obvious one would be to whack a trench right through the middle of it but we we really want to find out a bit more about how well preserved it is where the width of it is so what we're going to do is just pop one in through there that will give us the precise width of the walls it will give us the location of the walls and it will give us some idea of the depth of deposits as well you seem quite exciting your passion is prehistory yeah but this is this is the prehistory of the industrial revolution good [Applause] arkwright created two cutting-edge systems for the mill the first was a steam engine to power the mill directly something no one else had yet achieved the second was an innovative water system that used a steam engine together with a water wheel we hope to find evidence of both systems near the center of the mill but to find this we need to find the mills walls even though we've got various plans they aren't reliable so the diggers will place trench one here which they hope will stretch across one side of the original mill the site hasn't been developed since the blitz of 1940 when a mill rebuilt in the victorian era was destroyed by the luftwaffe because of the hard modern tarmac the geophys team can't stick their normal sensors in the ground instead they're using radar to cover the whole mill area which will take them all day within an hour of stripping the surface phil thinks he's hit the jackpot kerry this is it this hit the wall of the milhouse we've got the yard out there and here's the wall and then inside the mill let's see a bit more of this wall here if phil has hit the wall of art right 1780s mill he's uncovered a building at the root of massive change in manchester a building that helped transform a village into a metropolis we've got this plan of manchester from the 1740s and it's beautiful you've got a hunting scene pretty little sailing boats hardly built up at all quite rural isn't it yeah but then 50 years later it's really built up so what did it happen manchester's boomed as a textile town in part because of arkwright's mill coming in the early 1780s that's led to a huge number of additional houses huge number of additional factories i wonder what the local people must have thought when our rights mill went up i think they must have been astonished this is manchester's first mill it's its first chimney 40-foot high belching smoke and we got people coming to look at it as a tourist attraction they were amazed so you're quite optimistic about what will come out of the archaeology i am this is not only is this manchester's first text album it starts the modern world it starts the whole industrialization process it's not just a building that is important regionally it's also important nationally such a bold undertaking was typical of arkwright an astute businessman what sort of man was he well he was described by a contemporary as a gross bag-cheeked pot-bellied lancashire man with a copious free digestion he had warts on his face and i don't think he felt very easy in social situations he must have been pretty well off i think he had a huge wealth he had wealth accrued from his own spinning benches but of course without the risk by selling licenses and ensuring that those licenses were only available for factory-based cotton spinning so you could say that he was the father of the whole factory system in britain you could do yes oh phil what we got here back at the car park phil's convinced he slap bang on arkwright's wall but francis isn't so sure we've got the edge of the mill there's the cobbles there's the wall here's the edge of the wall and i think this is an internal floor are you sure that's a wolf well that seems very flat and even that surface what do you mean if that is not the wall where the hell is the wall then well yeah that is the question but you gotta convince me all right well you go away give me some time and i'll try and prove it [Music] while we don't know exactly where the walls are we've got a good idea of the dimensions of the mill arkwright built his mills to a standard size this was determined by the huge machines inside the mills like these ones at quarry bank mill museum just outside manchester the dimensions of the manchester mill are also in archival records about 30 feet wide by 170 feet long [Music] as well as trying to find more walls we're putting trench two over what we think is the middle of the mill to find any evidence of the original power system [Music] but as we strip off more and more of the tarmac there's another complication in finding the original walls surprises these bricks in a right old state aren't they directing that blackness has got anything to do with the blitz i think that could be yes but there's a lot of charcoal around the place from an earlier fire in the middle of the 19th century i mean these places really were fire traps so what kind of problems do they have mike cotton itself it's it's it's a very uh flammable material so when you're manufacturing it if if you're adding in all the all the oils and grease for the manufacturing process it's very easy to set it on fire and there were dozens of fires in mills in manchester alone ruthie found loads of clay pipes haven't you did they actually smoke in the factory what the workers and lower classes are doing they're actually breaking off the stems to make them into shorter versions which they call stubbies or more colloquially nose warmers up here and which meant that they were lighter to hold in the mouth and therefore they could actually work the machines whilst they were smoking as well so let's get this clear we're in a cotton mill where you've got loads of inflammable dust that can actually explode and the guys are puffing pipes frances has the fact that there have been fires here caused you problems in the archaeology well actually it has tony because you know the place is burning down and they knock it down completely and rebuild it and it's given us all sorts of rebuilds and re-phases and it's actually causing a bit of a headache [Music] despite the rebuilds the teams suspect that the best place to find an original wall is where the cobbled road leading up to the middle stops so trench three is put in at the edge of the car park the rise of steam driven machinery changed britain forever huge numbers of people flooded into the cities where factories provided work but such immigration brought about terrible living conditions one observer of living and working conditions in industrial manchester was frederick engels together with karl marx he started a worldwide political movement communism marx and engels discussed their ideas just down the road from our mill at cheatham's library this is a really eerie moment for me because we're sitting in exactly the same alcove that karl marx used to sit in when he came up to manchester to visit his old mate frederick engels what do you think they used to talk about in this alcove well i suppose they were setting the world to rights but unlike anybody else who might sit here and say how things ought to be they actually their ideas actually had some practical effect in the world and engels himself actually did a lot of research on the working class in manchester yes he wrote that he wrote this book here this is a photocopy of a bit of it the condition of the working class in england and what he says almost make you weep look here it says a whole family is often accommodated on a single bed he says about the conditions they were living in and sometimes a heap of filthy straw and covering of old sacking hide them in one undistinguished heap it's just terrible goes on to say often more than one family lived in a damp cellar containing only one room in whose pestilential atmosphere from 12 to 16 persons were crowded it's just horrific isn't it and even though it was written over 150 years ago it's still quite touched here isn't it it has it's just so horrible that it makes you want to find out more to find out how people could actually exist in a world like that gonna hold it on the fence for me at the top end of the car park helen starts her investigation into the living conditions described by engels as day one nears an end we're still not sure if phil's walls are arc right but mike's confident of the date of the wall in trench three well we stopped digging and starting the recording what happened here well what we've got here tony is we've got the end of the mill we've got the cobbles here yeah and then we've got a line of bricks a bit bashed about a couple of holes which have been bashed through in the mid 20th century but either side we have brick walling you see we've got two rows of bricks here and then a row of bricks and some stone sets over here and we think that's the doorway into the mill you say it's the doorway into the mill but earlier you said to me there were lots of mills at different times there are lots of mills now we're pretty certain this is our crate 1781 to 82 mil why this is a brick from 1854 it's very sharp it's wire cut and it's quite chunky very nicely made however that is a brick from this wall much much more irregular it's made in a wooden mold it's a slightly smaller size and it's far more irregular and this was made in manchester between 1780 and 1820. this is the brick from arkwright's first mill i bet you're glad you found that absolutely delighted so matt what are we gonna do with this trench now well that's it really tony's job done here but we have got a bonus and we've got to the end of the trench we've got this huge stone column base here and if you look closely you can see the the circle there where the cast iron flange would have been at the bottom of the column and these would have run all the way down the center of the mill there so presumably that's proof positive that we're right inside the factory absolutely by the end of the day we've found at least one piece of original arc right wall and we're uncovering possible sights for the engine and there's a whole other side of the story yet to explore for you this dig isn't just about some old bits of machinery is it no it's about the really terrible lives of the people that worked in the mill and lived right in its shadow in fact over there there were some buildings that we think had cellar dwellings underneath them where the people may have actually lived we can look at those tomorrow there should be some good fines there shouldn't they hope so but in addition to that we've started work on this trench here which is going to be huge and already we've come up with this really interesting arch here so tomorrow we're not only going to try and get into the hearts and minds of the people who lived here but into the heart of the factory that dominated their lives [Music] thank you beginning of day two and the first thing you notice when you drive into this manchester car park is that it's full of really nice cars manchester's certainly going through a boom time at the moment as it was in 1780 when richard arkwright arrived here to build his mill but within just a few years the people who worked at it were living in the most appalling conditions so today we're not just going to look at the factory itself but at the lives of the people who lived in its shadow at the top end of the site helen's investigating the homes on angel street next door to the mill so helen why are we over here well on the map we've got the houses here of people who almost certainly worked in the mill just within spitting distance so where are you mike can you see that expensive glass there francis yeah that's where new mount street comes out so we're almost opposite that just on this side i mean these look like sort of garden plots or something what would they be these are quite nice workers housing built in the late 18th century and by the time we get to the 19th century they're really the lowest buildings of the low you've got a family living on every floor including one in the cellar and some of the sellers were only eight feet square yeah but but originally these are actually quite nice artisan houses with only one family in each house okay now if we're going to make sense of these let's have a look i mean we need to come all the way along here a big trench like this yeah and we should get several property boundaries if we do that accounts from the 1830s tell us of some of the people who lived here on angel street margaret sheen age 26 factory worker catherine clark aged 8 patrick mcbridge aged 40 a drunkard in an attempt to find the homes of those who lived here bridge tears up more tarmac [Music] [Applause] yesterday the car park seemed to be giving us a textbook time team we appeared to be right on the original mill with arkwright's walls being revealed by phil in just hours we also found an arch which we hoped would help us to find the steam engines but it's not obvious whether this arch is from the first mill or a victorian rebuild am i right in thinking you think that this is the phase one or upright wall i do looking at the bricks i i think this is our original arc right here you see i've just been looking at it and this wall sits on top of this wall here so i think this is water's got to be later well it does does look like that doesn't it if you look at that break it sits on it but these these bricks are really these these are the same type as this which would make them are bright as well well you know there was the whole thing is art right yeah i mean there's no question that wall there is later than that or it sits on on the plinth there confused so are we suddenly mike and phil realize that 1780 bricks may not mean a 1780 wall so this arch may be nothing to do with artwright's engine worse all the dating they've done on the walls of the mill so far is thrown into question so francis pins hopes on a different tactic to work out the mills layout francis when i saw all the incredible stuff in this trench yesterday i was really excited i thought this is one of the only time teams i can remember where by the end of day one bang we've gone right down on the money we've got ark right but as day two has gone on we haven't we've lost him look all this diff is all this wonderful area how much is art right virtually nothing at all well i think one of the problems was that the arc right bricks we were identifying yesterday were probably reused arc right bricks ah so but that through us now i think we do have a little bit of arc right here and that's these column bases you can see there's one there another one there and another one coming up there arkwright used to use column bases to run down the center of his buildings so that gives us the alignment because we've also found one in that little trench over there this tiny little thing here yeah that's right and that also had the only bit of arc right wall that i'm prepared to swear by so three column bases and a tiny little bit of wall i no one yeah yes but look they're going down the middle of the building that gives us a spine of the building okay so let's have a look at where they're going come on right no you can see where those two ladies have obligingly stood yeah hello they're down the center of the building yeah and then the other one is over there yeah by the genuine arcrite raw now what we do know is the ark rights buildings were 30 feet wide if the columns are going down the middle if we measure out 15 feet on either side we'll get where the walls ought to be do we do that yeah you can come and help me come on grab the tape yeah hop in next door for that column yeah from the middle of the column uh the middle of the column right there you're right yep excuse me here we go 12. here we go 15 feet right so the wall by right ought to be here and there's solid brick all over it uh yes that's a slight problem isn't it what we'll do is look underneath them just to make sure that there is wall there and if we are on the money there this arc right smell so we go on it we dig it yes you sure certain bridges made great progress on her angel street house revealing nearly a complete cellar dwelling in just a couple of hours victorian reports from frederick engels and others describe the hardships of living and working in the mills of the area one of our team stuart has got a personal insight into what mill life would have been like his mother worked in a mill near leeds i remember how little money we had in those early days and uh i can remember hiding from the rent man because when we were a bit short on monday night we used to we used to have to keep quiet and the lights were turned down because there weren't man's expected and things like that it's weird because whenever we talk about mill life it seems like it was another era it's amazing to me that you who are relatively young bloke thank you still remember it well i do i agree i grew up with it my my mother was a weaver worked in in the weaving sheds all her life she was incredibly physically strong she worked eight looms at once but had to keep them all going the whole time so incredibly hard physical work you know one of the historians told me i thought it was so extraordinary that all those northern comediennes who used to speak like that with all those gestures they actually did it not as an affectation but because virtually all of them worked in the mills and it was so noisy there yeah that they continually had to do all that elaborate communication otherwise no one would ever understand what they were saying yeah and i can actually remember you know the looms turning the noise the workforce the people and one thing i remember about the lost my mom's friends and the weavers is that they they'd lost fingers because when the shuttle was going backwards and forwards you had to catch it and turn it round and if you didn't get it right it took your finger off and i remember a lot of my mom's friends all sort of missing the end of their finger or a finger missing and things like that so injury and deafness and hard work we're all part of a weaver's life [Applause] in our mills heyday there were 400 workers mostly women and children they'd have worked day and night as part of a new factory system [Music] today we're still having trouble finding the walls that define the mill that feels like clay underneath just about an hour ago francis came up with a master plan if we lift these bricks in the right place we ought to be able to find the wall of the original art right mill so matt has dug and look francis there is no wall the wall is entirely absent it is it's a wall-free zone i have to concede and there's lots of clay but no wall where's the wall well it's not there we know we can see that where is it well i'm not sure tony it could be that the walls further out than we thought could be as simple as that or maybe this floor has completely removed it we're just not sure basically this is the problem while the team rethink how to find the mill walls the search is still on for the engine and water wheel of course the machinery won't be there any longer but we hope to find a wheel pit and the brick base for the original engine what sort of engine are we looking for mike well one of the things we know are quite installed on this site was something called a rotative steam engine to power textile machinery and that looks like this big beam here with a cylinder at one end a support in the middle and the reason it's called rotative is it's got a great big flywheel at the other end now that is designed to transfer the up and down motion to a circular motion arkwright was the first one to attempt this and as he was the first it failed unfortunately so what he has to do is he has to go back to some older technology which is called a newcomen steam engine and that's very similar it's got a central stanchion big beam up there cylinder at one end and then at this end instead of the flywheel we've got a great big bucket for pumping water and that's moving water from a low reservoir to an upper reservoir and the reservoirs are to provide a head of water to run a water wheel so he's going from steam power back to water wheel technology but still using a steam engine to move the water around because the mill was nowhere near a river an artificial water system was built to power the water wheel stewart sets off to investigate how it worked at the site the radar results from yesterday are in and while they don't help us sort out the original from the later walls an anomaly has caught john's imagination what we're looking at the plans of the radar so these are looking at the horizontal slices here at the top and we go more deeply to the bottom here focus at the top here that's the cobbled road at the front of the building now these top layers are showing all the tarmac the disturbance and so on as we go deeper into the ground those disappear and look if i draw your eye to this particular anomaly and it actually continues down possibly to two meters now if we look at the plan this is taking one of these depths at about a meter or so there's the trench in blue with our wall lines and there's that blob so that's the pit well it could be francis now we know the diameter of the wheel it's 30 feet across which means it's the pit's going to be 15 feet deep which is what three and a half meters so the fact we've got it going down two meters that's pretty good that makes sense doesn't it the position of john's blob could give us the actual location of the water wheel pit john's not the only one who wants to find out where the water wheel is stuart's been working on the water system and he's giving me a bird's eye view sure we're involved in this desperate hunt for a water wheel but where did the water actually come from well the assumption has always been it came from a series of pits up that road up there see where the yellow sign is yeah and it came from a series of palms and came down this slope but we've actually made a major discovery while we've been here you see this lovely plan of about 1760. beautifully drawn isn't it which shows a plot of land here and importantly it shows water course there's a little stream flowing down here well you can identify that plot of land and it's actually that little plot of land there so the what there was a watercourse that came down here yeah and fed a pond up here there's the mill that pond there was actually just in this area down here below us and then there's an overflow which went into a very large pond which is down the slope where all those cars are there now what that actually shows is a very complex water management system around the mill [Music] so the water system seems to work like this water runs from an upper pond along a culvert at the side of the mill to a water wheel somewhere in the middle of the building having turned the wheel the water then runs out into a lower pond the water's pumped back up to the upper pond and so it's gone full circle and this early map gives us another critical clue importantly i think it shows us where the water wheel might be see on this plan this is our crate time 1793 a water wheel shown there now that looks to me pretty near where john's big blob is on his gfa it's almost exactly where john's blob is i mean we don't often agree but we agree about that water wheel and he's a normal they're in exactly the same position the wheel pit should be obvious as it would be brick lined eight feet wide and 15 feet deep if they can find it they would have located the center of the mill and so they could project the outline of the original building the team badly need this layout so far we've been finding lots of walls but we can't be sure which ones are the original arc right ones and which are from a later victorian rebuild you know those bricks but then phil has a brainwave look at this that is the mortar from the 1850 look at it it's really hard have a look at one of those bricks from arkroyd's wall we'll have a look at the mortar there oh now look at that that's as hard as concrete but this is soft brown limey stuff that's brilliant then because if that's our cricket that's 1854 exactly so we we couldn't rely on bricks but we can it appears rely on mortar we've just invented a new dating technique mortar dating well actually i mean it's going to be a godsend but it's going to allow us to sort out all those tricky problems right over there in the center of the site absolutely [Music] using this new mortar dating method the team discover the walls of artwright's mill are right where phil thought they were on the morning of day one the mill was in fact a whopping 40 feet wide instead of the 30 feet reported at the time of its building this means the records from the time were wrong well that's one mystery solved after two days of arguing and geo fizzing and excavating at last we think we may have the walls of arkwright's mill in addition to that in order to try and find out how it actually worked here we think we've got the water wheel it's not those flagstones they're part of some later 19th century pathway but if we whip up those flags tomorrow underneath it hopefully we'll get the mill in addition to that on this far side of the site we've been trying to see if we can find out how the people who actually did the work around here actually lived got a huge trench incredibly deep bridge has been working on it for about a day and a half now how's it going helen well it's just amazing it really brings you up short to see the actual place that people were living in these incredibly squalid conditions that we read the descriptions of and it's such a contrast with the mill it really makes you stop and think can you give us a walk through bridge sure i mean it's really interesting because once you're down here there's a very well-appointed and well-built seller you've got the entrance that would come down off the street through here and come straight into this room here i like to think it is the best room in the house it's got this lovely stone floor flag and then it's got this hearth over here then we've got a doorway that would have you'd come through to enter into this room with a very decorative brickwork floor and again we've got another half over here this has been like your kitchen room this is where you've done all your cooking over here there would have been a small window just here that would be your only form of light into the back room but you've got to remember that all around me here there was plaster and it was painted a vivid cornflower blue this isn't a hell hole it's actually rather nice well british talking about when it was first built 50 years later you've got a family in each room and a cholera epidemic raging it would have been just horrendous do we have a secure date for this place well we do actually embedded in this piece of plaster is what looks like a coin and if we can get the plaster off if we can clean the coin up we might get an exact date so a date for the plaster artwright's original mill and the water wheel all tomorrow beginning of day three and guess what it's raining in manchester mind you it would have been pretty wet here 220 odd years ago when richard arkwright built his mill because we're pretty sure the whole thing was powered by water and steam not that we've found that much of the factory because every time we've got anywhere near it it's miraculously seem to disappear through our fingers isn't it so are you really confident that we actually do have the water wheel here yeah yeah yes and yet you've been found wanting so many times over the last 48 hours why are you so sure well all the maps tell us the water wheel was in this position here where we stood we've seen it on the radar plan but if you're not convinced look at this vertical section there's the top of the ground that red line marks that road surface below that road surface is this clear response that has to be the wheel pit and does it work for you in terms of the logic of the architecture it does tony because we're in the middle of the mill and that in our track mill is where the water wheel will be so why is it so significant that we find this wheel well it will tie everything down i mean if you know the position of the water wheel it transfers the energy via a shaft into the mill and once you know position that you can work out where all the looms are how many would be the whole layout is dependent on finding that so how do we dig it well i think it's going to have to be big we're going to have to get in heavy equipment personally i think it's going to be quite a challenge do you notice he used the word challenge it's a modern word for we're really a creepy [Music] the diggers get down and dirty on the area where the team are convinced the bricklined waterwheel pit is in the incident room bridge and historian guy de la bedoire are investigating a key find yesterday we discovered a coin buried in the plaster of our cellar if bridge can clean the encrusted coin up it might give us the date of the construction of the seller but from the size that's an english happening and that could be 18th century or 19th century at the moment i'm really having difficulty even finding evidence of relief or no i can say it straight away look do you see that mark there hmm that's the foot of britannia which of course we still got on the 50 pence coin today but in those days was on the happening and the penny and her figure goes up like that there and that line there running up to just where you've got with cleaning that's called the exergy mark and under here is the date oh great so if you can take off the plaster here that small area we'll get the date hopefully if it's preserved great so it's not far to go that's right perfectly back on site the hunt for the wheel pit isn't going quite as planned francis can i remind you of an exchange earlier on today tony are you confident that there is a water wheel in this trench you four yes yes yes yes hello water wheel where are you it's not there uh it's turned out to be a little bit more complicated than that teddy is it yeah in fact it's it's all happening as we speak phil down there has got something and i don't know what it is he won't tell us phil what what [Laughter] well if you're give me some time to work it out i might be able to tell you what all i know is that there's something coming along here yeah which this wall is sitting on the top of i don't know what that something coming along here is but all i know is that the wall is on top of it and i'm gonna dig down there and try and find out what that thing that goes underneath is could that thing mike that goes underneath that wall be anything to do with our water wheel well conceivably it could be turning i think the issue here is the wheel pits if that's what it is ought to be 15 feet deep really from where we're standing here and um phil's got a bit of way to go yet before he's got to 15 feet look at those places just look at those faces you look like four boys who failed to do your homework at least there's good news from bridge who's managed to clean up her coin i can see the date guy put it up on the screen here we go look 1775. you're right there's the one seven 7 5 which takes us right into the reign of george iii look the truth is that the royal men produced very few coins in that period so there was a terrible shortage of coinage 1775 was forged and copied over and over again so this could very well be a forged hatefully of george iii paid by an exploitative mill owner who would only have paid a little bit more than a farthing for each one of these coins how long were these in circulation for these 175 coins well as you get into the beginning of the 19th century the royal mint is starting to produce far more coins and better quality coins this probably didn't circulate for more than 15 to 20 years that coin was almost certainly put into the wall of the house when it was built around the time our factory was being built that's fantastic i'm just so pleased about that so the coin confirms that the houses on angel street were built sometime in the late 18th century back at the mill trench phil still investigating his thing but next door to it the team think they found a boiler house this could give us a clue as to how the power system behind the mill worked a great discovery but it hasn't located the site of a steam engine nor does it help us find the wheel pit at the top end of the site bridge's trench has given us more than we ever expected anything new in your trench bridge well yes tony there has been can you see these bricks here yeah these are of a later date than the other seller wool bricks and it seems that when the mill burnt down in 1850 these seller houses also went through renovation what they did was they actually bricked up this doorway here between the two rooms and instead of having just potentially one family living here in two rooms the mill was able to hire out two separate rooms to two separate families who have lived in really quite cramped conditions from then on what about finds roof we've got a fairly standard set of victorian debris that you'd expect in the backfield but we've got a rare survival of a lady's clog from the victorian period it's possibly from a workers clog around this area however we know that they weren't wearing clogs in the mills at that time they actually used their bare feet to pick up stray lumps of cotton on the middle floor so quite nice little touch there but not our date no unfortunately but we have got something that is our date i've been looking through the poor rate books see it says angel street here number 35 which i think is this very house here we can see that it's divided into house cellar and shop and we've got the actual name of the person who is renting this out we know it's william metcalf so we've got a name of a person who was here in 1841 in exactly our cellar round said yeah got it really yes yards away phil's now uncovered the thing that ran under the wall at that then i wasn't expecting that it's a 20th century drain well i'm completely gobsmacked right we still got to find the mill wheel haven't we otherwise tony's going to make my life hell oh that's all right not only will they be given hell over a modern drain but the boiler house they excavated earlier turns out to be from a later period in a last-ditch attempt the team excavate the bricklined pit underneath it but at least our researchers have come up trumps in the early 19th century manchester boomed as a cotton town and the population exploded today with so much recent development in manchester there's little left of the places once home to workers who crowded the city [Music] hello here's the celebration but minutes from the site is an untouched testament to our story cool look at that oh we can fit through that no idea hidden underneath a modern shop is a rare gem a cellar dwelling wow come and have a look oh it stinks doesn't it yeah it's really damp and really close slightly disorientated well that's the front that's the road right and it's actually about the same size as our angel street one oh look there's manky old flint it's revolting isn't it looks like it's actually made of ashes from the fire and look at that that's this this a huge great fireplace that's been put in later that is really badly built right old state isn't it yeah presumably fire underneath of and above presumably there would have been some light here there would have there would have been a window there you can see where it's been bricked up but there would never have been much light because when the panes of glass broke they generally couldn't afford to replace them so just shoved rags in the holes do we know what date this seller was built it's about the same date as the angel street house it's about 1790 odd can you imagine what it would have been like living in here how many people do you want well one two three families three families in this case could have been yeah 12 or 16 people they say living in one room there would have been this kind of dam i don't see how they could have not had it cooking in here yeah all breathing going to the loo yeah no sanitation no running water horrible it would have stoned like it does now oh more so i keep a pig down here it just gets worse and worse disgusting back at the site with time running out the pit they're investigating has just got deeper and deeper i reckon we might actually finally have this well put you know that is deep that is deep how deep are you now well i did dangle a tape over there and it was 12 foot so it's supposed to be 15 foot so i'm me money's on three more foot and that's eight feet wide footwork just bang on the money for that one and we didn't see it mike francis come over here gotta think i want to see on the other side of the mill francis may have found something even more exciting under the arch found on day one all the walls down there all four of them appear to be lined in this stuff and it's all the way around well that looks like that pitch your bitumen but that's the sealant that's right then presumably that hole was designed to take water that's going to protect the brickwork yeah it would have to be watertight so to protect the brickwork so what's going on that could mean that's a well that could be pumping water pumping water um well well now this wall behind me is very thick ah we it's just possible francis yeah that we've got one end of our newcomen pumping engine right that would be incredible because that would mean this is the engine arc right installed in the 1780s after the attempt at steam power failed but but we're in the middle of the mill but exactly i mean you don't normally put them there do you no but what if what if this is the very first steam engine he installed the 1781 one which was meant to be running the machinery that would have to be in the middle of the mill like a water wheel to run the machinery it failed but instead of building a new engine they adapted it as a pumping engine that that would mean that we found our 1781 engine and and under our very noses it was here all the time okay okay thanks mike amazingly in the last hours of day three we seem to have found the most important parts of artwright's mill mike you lot have been making me promise after promise for the past three days have you delivered we have tony just just look at this it's deep it's massive isn't it i said to you that if we had the wheel pit we needed a hole eight foot wide and 15 foot deep and preferably 30 foot long i can't do the 30 foot long because that goes over there but that's 8 foot wide and it's 15 foot deep in fact we haven't got to the bottom so we're missing the arch out of which the water would have flowed but we've got other material in there for a skate we think that is the 1781 wheel pit all right so if the wheel was in there what about the steam come over here where are we going just just to here yeah do you remember these i do i remember them on the first day that lovely arch first exciting thing we found we now think this is the site of arkwright's 1781 steam engine he tried to use to power textile machinery but if that was his very first engine that was the one that didn't work properly it was so why is it still here well it was positioned in the middle of the mill so it could run the line shifting to pound the textile machinery that way yeah it didn't work so what it looks like they've done is they've reused it for pumping water from the lower reservoir through the well there and out onto a spillway into channels running that way arkwright's mill led the rise of the cotton mills in manchester making the city the cradle of the industrial revolution the factory thickened the air with smoke and noise dominating the lives of the poor arkwright's mill was also the site of innovative technology that we've managed to reveal in our three days this is how we think our mill worked an artificial water system drove the machinery an engine pumped water between the lower and upper ponds pushing water over a water wheel it was a radical system for its time but not as radical as the failed system it replaced in 1781 artwright first installed a steam engine to drive the machinery directly it didn't work but this technology did inspire others who eventually succeeded and within decades had taken over and mechanized british industry how significant a fine is this ah this is this is monumental this is what we've been looking for this is the first time somebody has tried to apply steam to textile machinery so this isn't just archaeology this is history this is where the modern world begins to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 129,146

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team, time team full episode, time team manchester, time team rubble at the mill, time team digs, time team season 13 episode 3

Id: bTlIv2Taz1o

Length: 48min 47sec (2927 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021