Location Dukinfield Built 1885 Floor count 4 | Owner Christian Koch Renovated 1: Year 2016 | |
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Current owners English Fine Cotton Ltd | ||
Tower mill is a cotton mill in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester. It is a grade II listed building. It was designed by Potts, Pickup & Dixon in 1885 and spun cotton, using mules and spinning frames, until 1955 when it became derelict. It was bought, restored and re-equipped to ring spin superfine counts in 2016 and now is the only cotton mill in production in the United Kingdom.
Contents
Description
This impressive building produces spun cotton. It specialises in superfine long staple cotton such as American Supima. The building has been totally renovated.
The building
The ground floor houses the six stage blowing room where the fibres are opened, plucked, cleaned and blended: with bale breakers (openers, bale pluckers), carding machines, a drawframe to draught the sliver, a lapformer, a comber to remove the short fibres, a speedframe to attenuate further and wrap the lap onto roving bobbins. The frames are by Toyota Truetzschler.
The first floor has the ring frames where the finished cops are taken to the autoconer which cuts out and repairs any imperfections. Yarn can be plied when required.
Cotton varieties
Only four varieties of the cotton genus are used commercially- coarse counts use surat, while the fine counts use types of Gossypium barbadense. These are all extra long staple (ELS) cottons- They have a staple length exceeding 35 millimetres (1.4 in) and often over 40 millimetres (1.6 in) while 'upland' cottons are 27 millimetres (1.1 in). The longest staple are 'special' hand picked American Pima, Sea Island, Indian Suvin and Egyptian Giza 45.
English Fine Cotton are purchasing 85% of their Pima from J G Boswell, the world’s largest Supima cotton farm in California. The cotton bales can be tracked to the section of the field where it was grown and the date when it was picked. The combine harvesters run on a precision GPS navigation system. The cotton is ginned on the farm before it is baled and exported.
History
Built for Christian Koch, this 4 storey mill is similar to River Mill, but more ornate being a Potts design. It had 44,000 spindles and 5000 twiner spindles, doing coarse counts. The River and Tower Mills Co Ltd (1912) ceased spinning at River Mill in 1934, but by increasing the reliance on ring spinning kept Tower going until 1955. On closure it had 13,000 mule and 24,000 ring spindles.
Revival
In 2015 the mill was chosen as the new manufacturing site for English Fine Cotton. The company is investing £4.8m with a £1m grant from the Textile Growth Programme to restart cotton production in Greater Manchester for the first time since the 1980s. The mill is using new technology frames and produces cotton for high value products.
Media
The BBC One series Making Out was filmed at the mill and broadcast from 1989 to 1991.