Whaley Bridge in the Peak District: 100 feverish years

To be honest, the idea behind the holiday was simply to get away from home. The Peak District was conveniently close, and  a house picked almost at random simply because it was available brought us to Whaley Bridge. The house was chosen for the view, and it certainly had a spectacular view, positioned as it was a few hundred feet above the town itself. This is how we arrived at our destination without the slightest idea of what the town might be like. 

Whaley Bridge is a small town on the Goyt river, which forms the border between Derbyshire and Cheshire. We never actually saw the bridge; there didn’t seem to be much evidence of the river in the centre of town. Whaley Bridge looks like many other small towns in the area: small-scale urban, a Co-op, a fish and chip shop, several charity shops, a small station on the line from Manchester to Buxton. Most of the buildings were of the typical dark stone found in the Peak District (to be precise, Whaley Bridge isn’t part of the Peak District National Park at all). Houses were rather small, and there was little to see that was at all remarkable. 

But Whaley Bridge soon revealed a rather different image. From our house on the hill, it was evident that there is little flat land in the area. A walk into town was easy going down, but a ten-minute strenous exercise to get back up the hill again. On the first day, with constant drizzle, we followed the path just to see what was there. Down by the river was the first shock: an old railway bridge, which seemed to be in the middle of the town. 

 

This bridge was the start of the Peak Forest Tramway, an industrial railway moving goods to and from the canal up into the hills. When you turned round from this bridge, there was a very uninspired new housing development (the Woodbrook Housing Estate). The only difference between these new houses and the traditional terraced housing in the town was a few inches of space between the houses, as if detached houses provided clear evidence of higher status for the owners; plus, of course, the almost obligatory glass-roofed conservatories, breaking all the insulation provided for the houses. 

The estate would not be worth mentioning were it not for one sign at the entrance: Goyt Mills, 1865. This was the site of the former textile mill of Whaley Bridge, with 200 looms when it opened. What a sad contrast! 

A few yards further on was more evidence of an industrial past, but this time intact: a grand stone building, the Transshipment Warehouse of 1801, which, even without its third storey, is still a very impressive monument to the industry of the day. The Warehouse was used to transfer goods from barge to rail and vice versa. 

But the biggest discovery was still to come. About half a mile down the canal spur to Whaley Bridge is the Bugsworth Canal Basin, a complete inland port, gloriously restored to something like its former state, with flyovers (from the early nineteenth century!) for the rail trucks carrying the goods. You could imagine from the scale of the site how many canal boats would be loading and unloading here. A curious incidental detail was that the nearby village changed its name from Bugsworth to Buxworth in the 1930s – perhaps evidence of a shift towards euphemism, and the present-day mania for naming streets with bland and inoffensive titles. 

That short walk was quite a revelation. Whaley Bridge does not rank as a major tourist site, and yet here were some of the most significant industrial remains in the Peak District. How did all this arise? 

Well, despite all the usual sources stating that there are Roman and earlier remains and that the bridge is “ancient”, the earliest reference to Whaley Bridge appears to be from 1597, an enforcing order to repair the bridge. If there was a community there, it must have been very small. But in 1791, an advertisement was placed in the Manchester Chronicle, offering for sale land at Whaley Bridge, for the establishment of industry, stating that “children and grown-up persons are mostly in want of employment”. In other words, present-day Whaley Bridge is largely the result of speculation from the time of the industrial revolution. At various times in the 19th century, Whaley Bridge had coal mines, quarrying, textile bleaching and printing mills, lime kilns, and even a gunpowder factory! To give an idea of the scale of the activity, there were 21 people employed at the station in various roles. 

Leaving aside for a moment the appalling labour conditions during the Industrial Revolution, it is astonishing to think that such a small place can have become such a hotbed of innovation for a hundred years, and then somehow to have reverted back to the pleasant but insignificant town of today. The only sign of interesting activity in the present-day town I noticed was the Footsteps Bookshop. “Bookshop” is a bit of a misnomer; it turned out to be more a community centre and coffee shop, although as I visited people were bringing in bags of books – the sort of bookshop where your value as a book donator was more the size of your bag than the quality of the books. Footsteps is run by a community trust, and looked lively and well populated. 

What to make of Whaley Bridge? My understanding of the town was greatly helped by the admirable Whaley Bridge in the mid-Nineteenth Century, a pamphlet published in 1978 as a result of an extra-mural class run by Manchester University. But even that excellent publication, based on analysis of records, didn’t answer the fundamental question, for me. Did Whaley Bridge just have a hundred years of feverish activity, almost by accident? Just because there was a good source of water? How does innovation like that happen? Did the industrial innovation have any connection with the town, or was it simply imported, only to disappear as the industry moved away?