Textiles: From domestic to factory production

A surviving cloth hall

Markets could sometimes be large-scale affairs, like these surviving buildings of Piece Hall, Halifax, successor to the market that domestic producers such as Cornelius Ashworth would have used.

This first image of Piece Hall shows that the market was separated from the rest of the town.

---

Weavers came from the villages around to sell to the local cloth merchants. These merchants would then trade with richer merchants from London and other trading centres, who came to buy cloth in bulk.

All the images suggest that the architecture of the hall was designed to impress. Here was a building that was designed to show off the wealth of the Halifax traders who financed it, while also separating the market from the town outside.

---

Like other important buildings of the same period it was designed in the classical style (which meant that it referred or looked back to the world of ancient Rome).

---

The central area was used for buying and selling while cloth traders had offices and shops in the buildings around it.