Reviving Todmorden: A Tale of Industrial Renaissance
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Todmorden was dominated by the cotton textile industry. Water-powered and steam-powered mills once dotted the town's canal side, railway line and valley areas.
However, with the rapid decline of the cotton economy in the later twentieth century, the textile mills and their associated iron foundations, bobbin mills and engineering works experienced varying degrees of disuse and abandonment, and underwent a series of demolitions and alterations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Today it is difficult to see the original large mills and chimneys in the town of Todmorden.
Following the decline of the textile industry, Todmorden is also experiencing social problems such as rising unemployment and low living conditions. Coupled with increasingly significant climate problems, flooding has been a constant problem for residents and users of buildings around the canal.
How to revitalise the town to a certain extent, how to cope with climatic problems such as flooding, and how to make the urban memory of the industrial era revived again have become the issues that this thesis focuses on.
