Working Lives in the Factories and Mills: Textile History and Heritage
Learn how textile workers' lives evolved alongside the textile industry
On this course, you’ll explore the relationship between textile factory labour in the past and British industrial heritage today.
You’ll delve into a fascinating period of development for one of Britain’s key industries and discover how workers’ lives changed throughout the Victorian period, as they adjusted to new professional identities, workplaces and technology.
Through video, you’ll be introduced to four different millworkers’ heritage sites: New Lanark, Stanley Mills in Perthshire, Verdant Works in Dundee and Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, as you explore their history.
What topics will you cover?
- Explore the range of activities involved in working in factories and mills in the long nineteenth century, and how these changed during the period covered by the course.
- Assess representations of millworkers from this period, as well as writings by the workers themselves, and discuss how they relate to wider questions of class, gender, and professional identity.
- Investigate how museums represent factory workers.
- Locate material relevant to this field through online archives.
Course provider
