Oldham

About Oldham in brief

Oldham is a large town in Greater Manchester, England, amid the Pennines and between the rivers Irk and Medlock. It rose to prominence in the 19th century as an international centre of textile manufacture. At its zenith, it was the most productive cotton spinning mill town in the world, producing more cotton than France and Germany combined. Oldham’s textile industry fell into decline in the mid-20th century; the town’s last mill closed in 1998. The demise of textile processing in Oldham depressed and heavily affected the local economy. Today Oldham is predominantly residential town, and the improvement of the town centre is the focus of a project for transforming Oldham into a centre for further education and the performing arts. As of 2001, the town had a population of 103,544 and an area of around 26 square miles. The toponymy of Oldham seems to imply \”old village or place\” from Eald signifying oldness or antiquity, and Ham a house, farm or hamlet. The name is understood to date from 865, during the period of the Danelaw. Although not mentioned in the Domesday Book, Oldham does appear in legal documents from the Middle Ages, invariably recorded as territory under the control of minor ruling families and barons. In the 13th century Oldham was documented as a manor held from the Crown by a family surnamed Oldham, whose seat was at Werneth Hall. The Cudworths remained the lords of the manor until the sale of their estate to Sir Ralph Assheton of Middleton in the 18th century.

The town’s soils were too thin to sustain crop growing, so prior to industrialisation the area was used for grazing for sheep, which provided a raw material for woollen woollen material for the local weaving industry. The earliest known evidence of a human presence in what is now Oldham is attested by the discovery of Neolithic flint arrow-heads and workings found at WERNeth and Besom Hill, implying habitation 7–10,000 years ago. Although Anglo-Saxons occupied territory around the area centuries earlier, Oldham as a permanent, named place of dwelling is believed to date to 865 when Danish invaders established a settlement called Aldehulme. Although Oldham has been a town since the 9th century until the Industrial Revolution, it has been little more than a scattering of small and insignificant settlements spread across the moorland and dirt tracks that linked Manchester to York. It was a boomtown of theIndustrial Revolution, and among the first ever industrialised towns, rapidly becoming one of the most important centres of cotton and textile industries in England. It is now one of Britain’s largest towns, with a population in excess of 230,800. It has been said that the town is so firmly and squarely on the map of the world that it is Oldham that is that town that is firmly on the world’s map.