About Us

 

KirkMill.org.uk and the Kirk Mill Heritage Hub

This website is part of the Kirk Mill Heritage Hub, a project being managed by The Heritage Media Trust.

The Heritage Media Trust was set up by Sue Price, Muriel Lord and Margaret Smith to preserve and promote heritage and cultural places, spaces and traditions through different media.

The Kirk Mill Heritage Hub is proud to have received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £9,800 to carry out oral histories on video about Kirk Mill in Chipping and its 500+ year history of continuous industrial activity. The project will also research different archives, collect photographs and other artifacts about the mill and bring everything together into an online archive.

Kirk Mill

Kirk Mill started life, as far as we know, as a corn mill. The earliest record we know of dates to 1544. This record documents a change of ownership of what was already establish as a water corn mill at Kirk Mill. So this site in Chipping dates back at least to the early years of the 16th century. It has been recognised as a site of ‘significant heritage value’ as it is possibly the only factory or site of industry to have been in continuous use for at least 500 years. In 1785, the site was sold to Hugh Stirrup, who set about rebuilding it as an Arkwright style cotton spinning mill. Upon the demise of the cotton spinning industry in Chipping, John Berry and other chairmakers set up shop on the site, where chairs were made by him and his descendants right up until 2010, when the factory closed. Planning permission has since been granted to developers who bought the site, for an 18-room hotel, spa and wedding venue. The site is currently for sale.

The Heritage Hub

The key part of this project, however, is the ‘Heritage Hub’. This is a network of online articles and submissions that detail different aspects of the mill’s history: important dates and the people who owned, managed and worked at the mill.

We would like to invite anyone who has a story, a photograph or anything else that will enrich this archive to join up and share what they have. Kirk Mill may have an unknown future, but we can preserve the past of this precious place, which is recognised as a place of ‘significant heritage interest’ not just to Chipping or even Lancashire, but to the whole country.