Weavers' Cottage - Lancashire Cellar Loomshops

Lancashire Cellar Loomshops

By the end of the 17th century three localised areas of textile production could be identified in Lancashire. Linen was woven in the west of the county and in Manchester while in upland Pennine regions, woollens were woven and in central Lancashire the emphasis was on fustians, cloth made with a linen warp and wool weft. In central Lancashire weavers subsequently switched to calico, cloth with a cotton warp and a cotton weft. In the 1790s, the demand for calico expanded and more towns switched to cottton weaving producing cloth for the emerging printing industry.

Weaving cotton requires humid conditions and cotton needed to be sized, strands of warp thread were coated with a layer of paste to prevent chafing against the healds and reeds in the batten. If the size hardened it broke the thread. Loomshops were built in the basement or on the ground floor. The weavers kept the floor beneath the loom moist, sometimes by digging channels into the clay floor and pouring in water. The loomshop was entered through the family accommodation so humidity was not lost to the outside. In such a cottage, one ground floor room became the manufactory, and the family lived in the other, a kitchen living room.. Sometimes a basement was excavated beneath the family home lit by elongated windows. The term 'cellar loomshop' was used for both ground floor and basement establishments.

In the peak years of handloom weaving around 1820, there were 170,000 handloom weavers in Lancashire . The 1851 census recorded 55,000 hand loom weavers in the county while the 1861 census records 30,000 and the 1871 census 10,000. By 1891, few were left. The figures give some indication of number of weavers cottages that existed. It is probable that there would be four looms in each shop.