Sunny Bank Mills: The 200-year-old former textile mill famed for Heartbeat and Emmerdale filming which has pivoted to become “the biggest single creative hub in Leeds”

Sunny Bank Mills started off as a club mill and was run by a group in Farsley who focused on the production of wool cloth in 1829.

The owners of the club mill decided to sell it to an individual called Edwin Woodhouse 50 years later and he significantly increased the size and reputation of the mill.

He subsequently sold the business to a family in 1913, then four years later it was bought by the Gaunt family - who have owned it ever since.

Managing director and fourth generation owner of the mill, William Gaunt, has been working at Sunny Bank Mills since 1984 and reflects on his family’s ownership of the mills.

“My great grandfather was a textile tycoon and very successful,” Mr Gaunt said.

“He owned mills throughout the world, in fact, around the beginning of the 20th century.

“However, he was caught out in the crash of 1929 during the financial crisis and lost all of his mills at that time. He owed a lot of people and banks a lot of money and he couldn’t escape his debts.

“He died in 1942 and my grandfather negotiated with the banks and Inland Revenue to get ownership of £1m of his empire (which was Sunny Bank Mills) and it’s been a steady ship since the 1940s and produces the finest cloth in the world.”

The Gaunt family decided to sell the weaving business in 2008 to a competitor and began regenerating the mills in 2010.

“We wanted the mills to be a place of employment,” Mr Gaunt said.

“That’s one of our key principles, the other was to preserve as much of the heritage of the mills as we possibly could, so we didn’t want it to be knocked down and turned into a supermarket for instance.

“The other thing is we wanted to engage with the local community, historically we’ve employed a lot of people from the village and we wanted to re-engage with the local community.

“We made a fantastic group of people redundant when we sold the business.

“It’s those three principles: employment, heritage and community that drive our decision making processes.”

Looking back at history, Mr Gaunt described how the mills had contributed to the Industrial Revolution.

“There were mills, certainly in Bradford, which were a lot bigger than us and actually drove innovation themselves, such as Listers Mill and Bolts Mill,” he said.

“We were a much smaller cog in the wheel but the mill wouldn’t have happened without the Industrial Revolution and the whole village was very important.

“We adopted machinery as it was developed but the reason the club mill started in the first place was because machines came along that needed steam power and were too big to fit in the houses and too expensive for them to buy.

“They had to construct a mill that was capable of holding large steam powered machinery and find the capital to run that.”

There were many ways Farsley weavers used alternative methods of cloth production, due to power looms being controversial at the time.

“I think there was a lot of resistance here in the village from the handling weavers to adopt the power loom because it meant that men lost their jobs to women. Women could run power looms,” Mr Gaunt said.

“The shuttle loom was the standard way of weaving cloth for several hundred years but it had its limitations and after the war lots of loom manufacturers were looking to overcome those limitations of the shuttle loom.

“So there were a lot of innovations in the late 1940s and 1950s and 1960s around alternatives to using the shuttle. The Rapier loom was one of the inventions of that time. Nowadays I think it’s fair to say that no commercial looms would use the shuttle looms.”

Major changes were made to the mill over centuries, but one of the biggest changes was when it stopped producing textiles.

“It was a big change in the mid-19th century from being a club or cooperative,” Mr Gaunt said.

“It changed direction from being a woollen mill to a worsted mill, producing higher end cloth; Farsley was traditionally a woollen village and most of the cloth here was unified cloth.

“The next big change was when we decided the mill was no longer going to produce textiles so we had to find a new use.

“The common themes throughout Yorkshire were that mills are an important part of our heritage and culture and community mills have got to decide what their future is.

“There’s no one answer to that: Each mill is in a different place, it’s a different size, a different shape and each mill has to find its new use.”

Sunny Bank Mills has been the venue for filming major TV shows and soaps, the Great British Sewing Bee on BBC, Heartbeat and Emmerdale.

These have had significant impacts on the success of the recently transformed mills.

“Here we’re always a centre of creativity,” Mr Gaunt said.

“We produce collections and some studios have been here for 20 years like Emmerdale and Heartbeat, so I think that’s shaped the mill and we’re still a very creative place.

“We have been identified as the biggest single creative hub in Leeds.”

Mr Gaunt told The Yorkshire Post how the business has strengthened community spirit and helped increase employment in Farsley.

“We’re not producing textiles now, we have lots of businesses here in the creative sector,” he said.

“We are employing as many people as we did when we were manufacturing. I think that’s an important sector in Leeds, it’s developed out of the demise of the printing sector.

“We’ve got our fair share of businesses here which are supported by photographers, we’ve got influencers, we’ve got artists, studios and there is a shortage of studios in Leeds so we try to bridge that gap.

“It’s important for the community as well, they’re really proud of their roots in the textile industry.

“A lot of them have parents or grandparents who worked, if not here, in mills across Yorkshire and they want their children to understand what their ancestors did and what real life was like.

“Sunny Bank Mills is a very important part of the cultural landscape in Leeds; it’s something we developed over the last 10 years for culture and arts.”