Housekeeping in Styal

Written by Ric

In January 2010 Ric, Ivan and Spence went to visit Styal Mill in Cheshire for a days fact finding. As you probably already know, under thier band name "The Housekeeping Society" they are making a concept album based on northern mill towns and Quarry Bank Mill in Styal is still a working mill (in fact it has the largest working water wheel in all of europe).



Spence was designated driver and other than a short war of attrition between Multimap and Googlemaps we got there safe and sound and on the way listened to some of the dodgy demos we have made of snippets for the new project. After some sandwiches in the car we hit the mill. Ivan soon kitted himself out with recording equipment so we could capture the sounds of some of the machines for use on the record (he got some undeniably funny looks). Without wishing to sound too nerdy, all the stuff in the museum was really interesting and gave us lots to think about. as well as the great audio stuff we found there were some great things in there that will definatley end up in our lyrics at some point. We also recorded some video stuff for our website and got some lovely photos as well.



After some good cake (tiffin) and a pleasent journey home we rounded off the day with a few pints of old perculiar in Fanny's Ale house in Saltaire and discussed our findings.