Upper Priory Cotton Mill

History

Spinning without fingers

For thousands of years every thread of cotton or wool had been spun by hand. In the 1730s two men in Birmingham set out to change that.

Lewis Paul was an inventor with a house in Old Square. His partner was John Wyatt, born in 1700. In 1738 Paul patented a machine that drew out cotton between pairs of rollers, so that the fibre was stretched and twisted by machinery rather than by a spinner’s fingers. Roller spinning was the idea that, decades later, would sit at the heart of the great cotton mills.

Two donkeys and ten women

The partners needed somewhere to prove it worked. They found a former warehouse in the Upper Priory, a street running north-west from Old Square towards Steelhouse Lane and Snow Hill, close to Paul’s house.

By July 1740 the machinery was already being shown to visitors: a letter of that month records a visit to “Mr. Paul’s machine”. The mill is usually dated to 1741, and Wikipedia’s account says it opened in the summer of that year. It had fifty spindles, turned by two donkeys walking round and round an upright axle, and at first it was worked by ten women.

This was not water or steam power, but it was power: the machine did the spinning, and animals drove the machine. That is why the Upper Priory mill is often described as the world’s first powered cotton-spinning mill. The Victoria County History of Warwickshire, more cautious, confirms only that “Wyatt himself worked at it in the Upper Priory for some time”.

Backers and debts

The venture had well-connected supporters. They included Edward Cave, the London publisher of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and Thomas Warren, a Birmingham bookseller. Through Warren and Wyatt there may be a link to the young Samuel Johnson, though that connection is a lead rather than a fact.

Money was the problem. The mill did not pay. In 1742–43 John Wyatt was imprisoned for debt. By 1743 the mill was almost derelict, and after late 1743 it disappears from the record. Like many first attempts, it showed the idea worked but not how to make it pay.

A street that vanished

No picture of the mill is known, and nobody knows exactly which building it was. The Upper Priory itself survived into the 20th century: the Ordnance Survey’s 25-inch maps of the 1880s–1900s show it clearly beside Old Square. In the 1960s it was swept away for the Priory Queensway and Colmore Circus, part of the city’s new ring road.

The name lives on in the Priory Queensway, and Old Square, though rebuilt, is still a public space. William Westley’s 1732 print shows the square as Lewis Paul would have known it, with neat brick houses around a garden.

A beginning

The Upper Priory mill has no plaque, no ruin and no archaeology. Its evidence is a handful of letters, printed by historians in the 20th century. But it marks a real beginning. Within a lifetime, machines built on the same principle of drawing out fibre between rollers would fill mills across Britain. One of the first places anyone tried it was a converted warehouse in Birmingham, with two donkeys going round in circles.

What happened here?

Lewis Paul and John Wyatt set up roller-spinning machinery here, shown to visitors by July 1740 and usually dated to 1741. Fifty spindles were driven by two donkeys and worked at first by ten women. The business struggled; Wyatt was imprisoned for debt in 1742–43, and the mill was almost derelict by 1743.

Why it disappeared

Other or unknown · Road building

The business failed: Wyatt was imprisoned for debt in 1742–43, the mill was almost derelict by 1743, and there is no record of it after late 1743 (sources summarised by Wikipedia, citing Wadsworth & Mann 1931). The Upper Priory street was later swept away in the 1960s for the Priory Queensway and Colmore Circus.