Watermills · West Midlands
Britain's industrial heritage
Mills, mines, ironworks and the Industrial Revolution's first sites.
Britain industrialised first; Britain therefore preserves the world's earliest factory floors. Ironbridge in Shropshire (1779 — the first iron bridge) is the symbolic centre, but the network extends to Cromford (the first water-powered cotton mill, 1771), the Wedgwood factory at Stoke, Saltaire's worsted-wool village near Bradford, and the slate mining villages of north Wales. Together they form a UNESCO-recognised industrial landscape.
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