Saddleworth News Reader Solves Oldham Mills Mystery
(original picture: GMP; captions: Mick Ashworth)
A Saddleworth News reader has answered a police appeal for help in identifying an old picture of some of Oldham’s mills, taken from the air. The photo was found in the Greater Manchester Police archive, but didn’t have any labels on it, so force historians asked for assistance.
After the image was published on Saddleworth News last week, reader Mick Ashworth did a bit of digging and managed to work out which buildings were which. He’s put captions on the original photo as shown above.
Mick wrote: “I was intrigued by the GMP archive photo you published asking for help to identify the mills in the picture. Your commenter Martin correctly identified the Olive Mill near where Tesco Werneth is now. The letters ‘OLI’ are just about visible on the mill chimney and a partial date. The Olive was built in 1883.”
He added: “I dropped into the Local Interest Centre to check out the street maps of that area from 1891 to 1932 and have identified all of the other mills. The photo looks like it was taken in the 1930s as the street and house-building pattern seem pretty close to the 1932 map. None of the mills named is still standing but some of the street names are still there, presumably named after the now-extinct mills built on them: Osborne Street; Ashley Street; Neville Street.”
Mick commented: “It’s a sad fact that this part of Oldham’s rich industrial past is so neglected. At the turn of the 20th century Oldham had an amazing one-eighth of the world’s cotton spindles and 360 mills at its zenith. Nearly as many mills as pubs, of which there were reputedly 365 when I was a kid, one for each day of the year!”
Many thanks to Mick for his research, which I’ll pass on to the police. You can see the original article and read more comments here.
Another classic police image recently published by Saddleworth News, featuring several mystery men posing for the camera, can still be seen here.
More archive pictures of the police in Oldham can be viewed at GMP’s Flickr page here.
Author: Jude Gidney - Editor
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