About Leeds Industrial Museum
Armley Mills was once the world's largest woollen mill and is now an award-winning industrial museum.
The museum contains exhibits dating from the 18th and 19th centuries that show the history of textiles, clothing and engine and locomotive manufacture in the area.
The museum also illustrates the history of cinema projections, including the first moving pictures taken in Leeds, as well as 1920s silent movies. During the regular 'working weekends' several exhibits are operated including water wheels, a steam engine and the great spinning 'mules'.
There have been mills on the Armley Mills site since the 17th Century. The original buildings having been developed in the late 18th century when a woollen mill and a corn mill were built.
A fire in 1805 destroyed these mills but they were rapidly replaced with the building which can be seen today. From the early 19th Century Armley Mills became one of the world's largest woollen mills, continuing the cloth-making tradition until Leeds City Council took over the Mills in 1969 in order to create a museum illustrating the mills' and the city's industrial past.