Workers at John A Wood Ltd, Mount Street Mills c.1920. Credit: Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.

Textiles are synonymous with the city of Manchester, which was known in the 1800s as ‘Cottonopolis’, after spinning around 80% of the world’s cotton. Now a second industrial revolution is in play.

Cottonspinning has returned to its birthplace of Greater Manchester, and the textile industry is set to create 20,000 jobs in the UK by 2020. The city contributes greatly to an industry now worth £9 billion (and rising) to the national economy has had a pivotal role in bringing back textiles manufacturing to the UK.


Manchester leads the way in a digital revolution as it becomes e-commerce capital of the UK, home to the world’s most successful fast-fashion companies. It is the perfect example of how an industrial city can reinvent itself. The city is an e-commerce powerhouse which employs more than 9000 people in over 30 businesses, and eBay reported that Greater Manchester has the largest concentration of small online businesses in the UK.


The city’s collaborative spirit has enabled it to create one of Europe’s most connected business environments and reinvigorate our clothing industry.


The Textile Growth Programme, responsible for much of the textile industry’s recent growth, began in 2013 and offers grants to textiles companies outside of greater London to create new jobs, safeguard existing jobs and revive manufacturing in the UK. It is headed by Lorna Fitzsimons, former Rochdale MP and director of The Alliance Project, who commissioned a report that shows that the UK textile industry’s contribution to the economy is experiencing year-on-year growth.

In 2016 alone, 5,000 new jobs were created in textile manufacturing in the UK. The programme focussed on five LEP areas, which had previously had a history of textiles manufacturing, including Greater Manchester, Nottingham and Derbyshire, and is the most significant initiative ever to be undertaken in the UK to support the UK textiles industry.The programme created 1,600 jobs and 115 apprenticeship positions in England during its first year of operation, and has driven investment into Britain’s fashion supply chain.


“Thanks to improved technology brought on by the digital age, the gap in manufacturing costs between the UK and off-shore production has narrowed which means making textiles products in Britain, and indeed Manchester, is becoming economically viable again,” explained James Eden, managing director of luxury clothing brand Private White VC.


Because of this, a rejuvenation in the textiles workforce is required and the focus is not only on young people, but also older textile workers, in an attempt to encourage them back into the industry.

Sankeys Soap, which became the legendary Sankeys nightclub, is part of Beehive Mill, a refurbished building at the heart of one of Manchester’s largest regeneration areas set within the Ancoats Urban Village development area. Credit: Pedrik

Lorna Fitzsimons, Director of the Alliance Project wants to reach out to those with the relevant skills and told me that, “We know that people who worked in the industry in the 80s and 90s have the skills we desperately need in order to compete with the global market.”


The Textile Growth Programme has bought so much confidence back to the industry that in 2015, English Fine Cottons invested £6m in bringing cotton spinning back to its spiritual home of Greater Manchester, to support weavers, knitters and dyers.


“We want to ensure high quality cottons produced here in Manchester are back on the high street, giving British consumers the products they deserve,” explained Director, Andy Ogden. More than 100 new jobs were created by the project, which regenerated a former Victorian cotton mill and uses cutting-edge technology to produce luxury yarn for domestic and global markets. This facility is the UK’s only cottonspinning company, reviving the iconic trade more than 30 years after the last cotton mills closed in the 1980s.


In 1781, Richard Arkwright – a central figure leading the Industrial Revolution, credited with inventing the spinning frame – opened the world’s first steam-driven textile mill on Miller Street in Manchester, and the city rose to power as a centre for the trading, production and storage of cotton in the 19th century. The cotton industry, above all others, came to dominate England’s pioneering path to industrialisation, and its centre was Manchester, largely considered to be the world’s first industrial city.


The excessive rain for once benefitted the region, the damp air meaning that the threads of cotton were less likely to snap and therefore ideal in the production of textiles, and the number of Manchester cotton mills reached its peak in 1853 with 108 mills.

Industrial Manchester allowed women many freedoms and in 1833, 58% of cotton factory workers were female and women accounted for almost 10% of business owners as early as 1788. Many censors taken and reported at this time, however, wrote out any influential female involvement, classing the labour as ‘unskilled’ along with that of children.


Children and women were exploited and while the industry was beneficial to the city’s economy, the conditions were harrowing for the ordinary people who worked there. Emily Gaskell attempted to accurately represent the poverty of industrial Manchester in her first novel ‘Mary Barton’, which explored the class divide and her own fears of how the poor would eventually act in retaliation to their oppression.

Engraving of cotton factories, Union Street, Manchester by John McGahey.
Credit: Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester

The First World War played a significant role in the decline of Manchester’s cotton industry and the city underwent a catastrophic process of deindustrialisation following the Second, but the mills remain central to innovative development in true un-diminishable Mancunian spirit in 2018.


While they no longer produce cotton, converted mills and warehouses have found new life as offices, hotels, artist studios and act as the base for the most successful fast-fashion companies in the UK. Manchester has earnt a new crown and is now arguably the fast-fashion capital of the world, home to Boohoo, Missguided and PrettyLittleThing – companies that may not be favoured by the ‘fashion elite’ but tower over most at the top of the UK e-commerce industry.


The fast-fashion business model of quickly recreating the latest styles at a budget price point naturally benefit from lower commercial rents and employee salaries than those in London, and the Manchester-based companies received little post Brexit knock as much of UK retail did. Some continue to speculate over the longevity of such rapid fashion, but statistics show that Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing continue to grow exponentially.


In a 2017 report by Hitwise, PrettyLittleThing was crowned fastest growing online fashion company, seeing a massive 663% rise in traffic since 2014 and Boohoo continues to double expectations at almost every sales prediction, showing that the industry shows no signs of slowing.

These businesses benefit greatly from being able to manufacture products in the UK given their focus on speed to market, and contrary to popular belief, sweatshops in Bangladesh are not the preferred, or main, process of production.


“At Boohoo, we are proud to source over 50 per cent of our products from the UK,” Carol Kane, CEO at Boohoo,has said.

“Not only are we delighted to support the British textile manufacturing industry and the creation of employment opportunities for workers in the UK, having our suppliers nearby is also a crucial part of our business model.”


With investment in British manufacturing, systems for producing fast-fashion can become more sustainable, with less importing c02 emissions, and more easily regulated working conditions and pay. Excuses o “miscommunication in a long email trail” when companies are found out for using factories that exploit their workers can no longer be admissible when they are made a short drive from HQ.


The booming textile industry now has the potential to add £500m more to the UK’s economy each year by 2020 and having that ‘Made in the UK’ stamp perfectly satiates consumers’ recent sustainable thinking. London remains the fashion capital for now, but it is quite possible that the fashion industry here will soon encompass more than just ‘low’ fashion.