Former Mill
on Silk Street This building on Silk
Street in Ancoats is intruiging but so far I know very
little about it. The occupied end of the building
has clearly been restored. It has two entrance
doorways suggesting that it was originally two separate
commercial properties. The bricks have been
cleaned and new windows and doors added. Inside
you can see cast iron columns which would appear to
be an original feature. There are two
columns of "taking-in doors" in the middle of the
frontage.
 In the aerial
photograph below, dated July 1953, you can see the
channels for the taking-in doors, indicated by my
red arrow.
 In August of 2010, a
company called Mainframe - Motion Shop occupy the
building. On their web site they say that, "Mainframe
is a creative production studio, specialising in
motion graphics and animation for ads, promos and
branded creative content. Most of the work
is for broadcast but output includes projects for
cinema, online and mobile media". "Clients include: BBC
Radio 1, Radio 2 and 1Xtra, Channel 4, Disney,
Google, Mtv, Nickelodeon, Sony Computer
Entertainment Europe and Virgin Media Television".
Attached to this
flat-roofed section are several more buildings
which appear to be empty and either boarded up or
displaying broken windows.
 The complex of buildings continues along Radium Street to George Leigh Street  The maps below, from the
mid 1800s, show that the site has had a number of
uses. In the first map an Iron Foundary was
located at the Radium Street end of Silk Street.
 At a later date J.
Walker's had a cotton mill there, and I think it likely
that at least some of the buildings on site today are
remnants of that mill.
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