A Tour of Tower Mill

Welcome to Tower Mill! It’s a hive of activity here and many of our supporters are itching to see inside, so take a look at our film and let us show you around.

https://vimeo.com/168922378

At the moment, the mill is changing everyday – this video was filmed a week ago and we have already made progress since then. The pace of the transformation is picking up as we work to get it up to standard and ready to house our high-tech machines, which will produce the finest cotton in the world.

Work is still being carried out on the building itself, and at the same time the machines are being delivered, stored and built. Each floor will play an integral part of the process, and in every room will be a machine with an important job to do.

The Ground Floor

This is where the cotton will be prepared and cleaned ready for spinning. Bales will be opened and plucked and then cleaned and blended in the blow room. The draw frames, lapformers and combing machines, which make the cotton slick and even, will also live on the ground floor.

The cotton will be put through all of these processes before it’s sent upstairs as a sliver for the next stage.

The First Floor

This is where the cotton will arrive in sliver cans to be put on the roving machines and drafted onto bobbins so it can be sent up to the third floor to be spun.

It will then return to this floor to the Auto-Coner for winding onto cones. The machine will analyse the thread as it winds it, which is a crucial part of our quality control system. After this, the cotton yarn will head to the next part of the process, either to the auto-clave machine for steaming to set the twist or, for plied yarns, to the assembly winder in preparation for the doubling process.

It’s here the cotton yarn will then be packaged and sent off to our clients.

The Third Floor

This is the heart of the mill, the spinning floor, where the six 50m spinning frames – and a further four to be built next year – will spin more than 10 tonnes of fine English cotton every week.

And that completes today’s tour! We’ll show you around again soon so you can keep up-to-date with all the changes.