TOWARDS the end of 2019, a small ruinous building off Staveley Road in Ingrow was demolished. It had fallen into disrepair and been vandalised after its last occupants had departed some ten years earlier. Although largely unknown, it was a building of major significance to Keighley. It was the first purpose-built mill of the town’s industrial era. Its origins had nothing to do with any of the traditional trades or crafts that had previously been practised in the area. It was a water-powered wire drawing mill built by Thomas Ramsden of Halifax, a manufacturer of carding combs for the cotton and woollen industry.
STANDING a forlorn and roofless shell on the edge of Gresley Road is Low Mill. Apart from the war memorial, it is Keighley’s only Grade II listed building. Throughout the country only six per cent of listed buildings are Grade II listed and those that fall into this category do so because they are “particularly important buildings of more than special interest” and as such warrant every effort to preserve them. Much abused and neglected over the past 30 years, Low Mill was the very first cotton mill to be built in Yorkshire at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.