Blackburn

Blackburn lies among the hills of Lancashire, where farming and household weaving long shared the labour of local families. Merchants supplied yarn to handloom weavers and collected the finished cloth for dyeing and sale. In the eighteenth century James Hargreaves, a weaver from nearby Stanhill, developed the spinning jenny, enabling one worker to spin several threads at once. New machinery and mills gradually transformed the textile trade around Blackburn.