WARNING: This episode contains descriptions of the mistreatment of children, and references to slavery which some listeners may find upsetting.

Two businessmen and a surveyor walk into the woods – not the beginning of some hilarious wisecrack, but the first few steps towards cementing a legacy. Traversing the sylvan slopes of the Cheshire countryside and clambering through dense vegetation along the river Bollin; engineer Hugh Oldham, merchant John Massey and ambitious textile tycoon Samuel Greg are prospecting for the perfect place to construct one of the first purpose built cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution. Around nine miles south of Manchester they stumbled across the serene bucolic backwater of Ferney Brow, a virgin glade at the bottom of a leafy valley, a short walk from the tiny village of Styal. It is here in seventeen eighty-four that the foundations were laid for not only one of the world’s first factories, but for a discrepant dynasty which would play it’s part in transforming the modern world.

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