Shaping the world

By Tony Butler

Tony Butler is Executive Director of Derby Museums

Where the Derwent meets the Trent, the power of water to build industry is at its most dramatic. The director of the new Museum of Making explains its significance.

Three hundred years ago, on the banks of the River Derwent, the first stirrings of industrial society were felt. Derby Silk Mill, recognised by many as the site of the world’s first modern factory, opened in 1721, and is now ascribed by UNESCO as part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.

Emboldened by the spirit of scientific discovery and by a belief that man might subdue nature, the River Derwent was harnessed to drive the huge water wheel which powered the mill. Nearly 100 years before, Francis Bacon anticipated the Enlightenment view of a completely knowable and controllable earth, he wrote in 1623, “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings.” (De Augmentis Scientiarum 1623)

The Silk Mill was an outlier of the industrial revolution. Built 50 years before Richard Arkwright’s famous factory further up the Derwent valley at Cromford, it was a wonder of its age. It was lauded by Daniel Defoe in 1726, who described it as an ‘engine’, as if parts of the machines and people who worked them were one and the same. Derby has always been a place of confluence of nature, people and ideas. The Derwent meets the Trent three miles to the south and was already an established source of power and communications. The Romans, and later the Vikings, established urban communities here based on trade, and by the 18th century Derby was, according to Defoe, ‘a fine, beautiful and pleasant town; it has more families of gentlemen in it that is usual in towns so remote.’ Prosperity created a flourishing cultural and intellectual life. Works by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of England’s greatest 18th century painters, are on display at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and capture the spirit of the age of Enlightenment. His works, The Alchymist (1771) and A Blacksmith’s Shop (1771), revealed how science and experimentation stimulated new industry. Wright also painted the new men of industry. In Derby Museum and Art Gallery hangs a huge painting of Richard Arkwright, the founder of Cromford Mill. Arkwright sits, comfortable, with a pot belly, a man growing rich on the new industrial society, where the resources of the landscape and people and machines were made part of the same system.

The Silk Mill was relatively late in transitioning from water-power to coal, and by the 1830s, its reliance on the flow of nature was diminished to be replaced by dependency on locallymined fossil fuel. Fossil fuel powered the engines which moved people and goods, creating supply chains, growing trades and encouraging new products to be developed and consumed throughout the world.

In the 1800s the Derwent Valley had been a landscape of power. In the

Arkwright’s Mills, by Joseph Wright, circa 1795. Purchased with assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund (with a contribution from The Wolfson Foundation), the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and the Friends of Derby Museums.

© Derby Museums

20th century, its waters too were extracted. To meet the industrial and human needs of the cities of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield, two enormous dams were built at its headwaters, changing the landscape forever. The Derwent dams played a key role in World War Two, used for test runs for the so-called ‘Dam-Busting’ raids on German cities in the Ruhr. Today the valley is marketed to visitors for its heritage and beauty, as a protoindustrial idyll – probably a far cry from the experiences of those mill workers three centuries ago.

As the world seeks a future repudiating fossil fuels, it is looking for new narratives of how to learn from the past. This year, three hundred years after the Silk Mill was commissioned, a new chapter begins in its story, as the Silk Mill is reborn as the new Museum of Making. It will explore creativity and manufacturing in Derby, showing how this medium-sized city in the Midlands shaped the Industrial Revolution, and how this affected its people and landscape. As Naomi Klein writes in This Changes Everything (2014), “as they industrialised long before anyone else, the British should bear more responsibility than most for climate change.” This is visceral for the Museum of Making, as during construction, the building was partially flooded in 2019 as the river Derwent rose to dangerously high levels – an occurrence likely to increase in the future, and something that has influenced how we have developed the building.

The museum has been built with the help of local companies and several thousand citizen curators, inspired by the stories of ingenuity and discovery, and also the lessons of exploitation. It will feature a myriad of trades from trains to textiles, aeronautics to ceramics. It will show the codependency of creativity with science and the importance of understanding of materials. For example, visitors will learn importance of ceramics to the manufacturing of jet engines.

Through hands-on making activity in fully equipped workshops, the museum hopes to inspire a new generation of makers who can address the challenges of the future, such as how we might live well together on a crowded planet within finite limits of nature.

The Museum of Making in Derby is now open. For more information, and to book a visit, go to www. derbymuseums.org/museum-ofmaking