Hall i' th' Wood

Hall i' th' Wood is a timber-framed Tudor manor house on the northern edge of Bolton, built in stages from the late fifteenth century onward. The oldest section is a well-preserved example of black-and-white half-timbering; later additions in stone were made in the seventeenth century, giving the building a pleasantly irregular appearance. The hall passed through various ownerships before falling into disrepair, and it was Lord Leverhulme — the same Rivington garden builder — who purchased it in 1899, restored it, and gave it to Bolton Corporation as a museum.

The museum inside covers the history of the building and its most famous resident, Samuel Crompton, who lived here as a young man while developing the spinning mule. The mule combined elements of the earlier spinning jenny and water frame to produce a machine capable of spinning thread of unprecedented fineness, and it was central to Bolton's rise as a cotton-spinning centre. Period rooms recreate aspects of domestic life in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and displays explain the mechanics of Crompton's invention and its global industrial consequences. The building itself, set in a small garden amid suburban streets, is one of the more atmospheric historic houses in Greater Manchester.

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A story
Samuel Crompton was a Bolton weaver of modest means who spent five years in secret developing his spinning mule in the upper rooms of Hall i' th' Wood, completing it around 1779. When the invention became known, he lacked the resources to patent it properly and was effectively cheated of most of its commercial value. The spinning mule transformed textile production worldwide — by the early nineteenth century it was responsible for the majority of cotton spun in Britain — yet Crompton died in relative poverty. A subscription eventually raised a belated payment for him in 1812, but it came too late to change his circumstances materially.