During the course of evaluation trenching at a site on Edward Street in Denton, one of the trenches uncovered the foundation of a chimney associated with a mid 19th century hat factory. Our team opened up the area around this chimney within which we traced the flue system leading to two Lancashire Boiler beds and a steam engine bed.
There was a well close to the boilers to supply them with clean water. The entire footprint of the Engine and boiler houses were uncovered as well as the foundations of the adjacent hat forming and dyeing rooms, the machinery of which would have been powered by the steam engine.
Denton was one of the six centres of the hatting industry in the 19th century and by the beginning of the 20th century it was the largest single centre of hat making in Britain. The factory that we uncovered belonged to Taylor Brothers who were established on the site since at least the 1850s although it is likely that smaller scale cottage based hatting was already occurring on the site in the early 19th century and possibly before.
The firm exclusively produced felt hats until their collapse in the 1930s when the factory was bought by Oldham Batteries who used the site for the production of traction batteries until the early 2000s. The remains of the steam powered factory are evidence of the beginning of mechanisation of the hatting industry in the mid 19th century and the move away from the traditional small scale cottage based production to centralised factory production