Macclesfield

Macclesfield is a Cheshire market town on the western edge of the Pennines. Silk working began as a household trade, including the making of buttons, before water-powered machinery transformed production. In the 1740s Charles Roe built a silk throwing mill in the town, drawing on machinery developed at Derby. Other mills followed, and the spinning and weaving of silk became central to Macclesfield's economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.