The changing face of Hall i’ th’ Wood through the years

Today – aside from signifying the iconic house, its surrounding neighbourhood, and even a train station – the name conjures memories of school trips familiar to anyone who attended primary school in Bolton.

Samuel Crompton

However, the Hall i’th’ Wood historic house museum remains closed over the short-term, as Bolton Council prepares a National Heritage Lottery Fund bid to help pay for essential maintenance at the Grade-I listed historic building.

A spokesperson for Bolton Council said the following: “We have been funded by Historic England to carry out surveys to begin to understand the condition of the building.

“This programme of works is on target, and we are developing a longer-term project for submission to the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This is a complex process that will take some time, as such, this is normal for projects of this scale and for buildings of this grading.

“In the interim, we will be involving the community through an engagement project, which we are currently seeking funding for.”

First built in the early-16th century, the oldest part of Hall i’th’ Wood is a half-timbered house with a stone-flagged roof.

Half-timber work is a method of building whereby walls are constructed using timber frames, and the spaces between these structural frames are filled in with wattle and daub.

Hall i’th’ Wood also bears an iconic Tudor façade, which was created through ornamental timber framing comprising scrollwork upon chequerboard-style panelling.

Samuel Crompton

The hall, at the time of its construction, was the manor overseeing the township of Tonge with Haulgh, which existed under the civil parish of Bolton le Moors. The Brownlow family managed the hall and its estate until the early-17th century.

Later significant additions to the structure of the house took place to the north in 1591, and to the south-west in 1648. These extensions to the property are stone structures, adhering to contemporary architectural tastes rather than to the half-timbering technique of the original structure.

In 1635, the estate was sold to the Norris family, and then onto the Starkie family in 1654, who let the house out to various tenants. It was in this form, a prototype of sorts for the modern HMO, that weaver Samuel Crompton came to live in the hall.

Crompton rented rooms in Hall i’th’ Wood with his family from 1758.

It was in the hall’s upstairs rooms that Crompton would invent the spinning mule in 1779, a machine that changed the course of history.

The spinning mule is a machine used to spin cotton fibres into yarn, which can then be woven into textile goods.

Crompton’s spinning mule elaborated earlier spinning devices­— Richard Arkwright’s water frame and James Hargreave’s spinning jenny.

The key difference was that the spinning mule produced strong, fine yarn, which could be used for a variety of textiles, including highly desirable muslin.

Despite having pioneered an invention which would be crucial to the early Industrial Revolution, Crompton never saw the profits of the spinning mule, as he lacked the means to patent the spinning mule. Crompton left the hall in 1782, moving on to a new lodging in Sharples.

The Victorians developed a fascination with Hall i’th’ Wood soon after Samuel Crompton’s death.

This fascination can be understood as reflecting the hall’s importance as the birthplace of the spinning mule, a machine so foundational to the Victorian industrial economy.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a poet of the period, wrote a poem which imagined the various residents of the hall as symbolic of “Change, change, wondrous change”.

The poem imagines “the feudal Lord” and “the Squire”, referring to the nobility who built and first inhabited the hall, before continuing on to Crompton, “the Man of skill” whose “thought and industry combined” yielded the invention of the spinning mule.

The financial burden of maintaining a Tudor property is by no means a struggle limited to the modern-day and the hall’s current owners, Bolton Council.

In 1899, Lord Leverhulme, the Victorian industrialist and philanthropist whose soap-manufacturing empire would become the modern-day Unilever, bought the hall and funded a large restoration project.

This project saw the interiors of the hall returned to a Tudor aesthetic, involving the installation of panelling removed from other 16th and 17th century houses and the insertion of plaster ceilings modelled on surviving examples in other period houses.

Lord Leverhulme gifted the property to the people of Bolton in 1902 following its repair, at which point Hall i’ th’ Wood was first opened to the public as a museum.

The name ‘Hall i’th’ Wood’ is quite self-explanatory, with the Lancashire dialect condensing the clunky ‘Hall in the Wood’ down to the familiar name. However, visitors to the hall for the last century or so will notice that the house is by no means situated in the thick of woodland.

Following the First World War, parts of the land owned by the Bolton Corporation as part of the Hall i’ th’ Wood estate were given over for residential development in the wake of a nationwide housing crisis. Over 400 houses were built as part of this development, with the aim of rehoming people living in Bolton’s slum areas.

A later development of flats and bungalows meant that, from one aspect, the hall no longer looked over parkland. A Bolton Evening News headline in 1965 asked: “Was it worth hiding the Hall?”, with the article lamenting the “damage done” to the hall as a result of housing development.

As Bolton’s residents look forward to the historic hall reopening its doors, looking back at the changing face of Hall i’ th’ Wood sets us alongside generations of Boltonians who – since the Victorian era – have turned to it as a symbol of our of our shared history.