Harle Syke mill is a weaving shed in Briercliffe on the outskirts of Burnley, Lancashire, England.

Shares in the room and power 'walls' company were traded resulting in a smaller number of shareholders with larger investments.

The new mill engine which is now displayed in the Science Museum, London, where it is run on occasions under steam power.

[2] Until the mid eighteenth century the agricultural workers on Briercliffe would supplement their income by having a wooden handloom at home where they would weave coarse woollen and mixed fabric cloth.

[3] Most worked in the existing farmhouses or the newly built weavers' cottages with the loom shop above the living space.

In Lane Bottom there was 'handloom factory' owned by the Smith family of Hill End, but there and in their cottage loomshops, handloom weavers competed for ever decreasing work in the sections of weaving for which the powerloom had not been adapted.

William Smith as the owner of a handloom factory was under the same pressures as individual rural hand loom weavers- and needed to modernise.

It employed 220 powerloom weavers half of whom were under twenty, 60% of them came from the village of Lane Bottom and only ten came from Haggate.

Hand loom weaving using the domestic system still continued with 317 families in the district containing a handloom weaver.

The Haggate Joint Stock Commercial Company achieved provisional registration on 27 March 1856 and registered 12 June and authorised to trade from 1 July 1856.

[7] The Haggate Joint Stock Commercial Company bought a piece of flat land adjacent to the Harle Syke brook, close to the new Anglican church outside Haggate on the Burnley Road, and proceeded to build a 300 loom shed with space for a steam engine.

At the end of five years in 1861 the company was trading profitably and investors decided to extend the shed.

As many of the weavers in the mill were also shareholders- they could continue their business by becoming tenants and renting power from the buildings company.

Harle Syke mill quickly gained a reputation as a nursery for fledgling companies.

[c] Two companies eventually dominated the shed: 'Simpson and West' who expanded into Belle Vue Mill in Burnley; and 'James Thornton and Co'.

The decision was forced by the need to replace the 1856 steam engine, an expense that could not be justified if the building were to remain a room and power mill.

All the assets were passed to the Harle Syke Mill Company who continued to provide 'room and power facilities' to the two remaining tenants.

The new company replaced the steam engine, built a new weaving shed stocked it with 900 looms and started to manufacture cloth again after a break of forty years.

[11] Harle Syke Mill closed in September 1959 when the shareholders agreed to join the Conservative government's Cotton Industry Reorganisation Scheme 1959 whereby compensation was given for each loom destroyed.

A Manchester firm Manifold Textiles moved into Siberia trading as Finsley View Manufacturing Company, took on the workers and continued in production until 1970.

In 2010 planning permission was given to convert the Burnley Road warehouse into 12 residential apartments, a clinic and nursery.

[12] [13] When yarn enters a weaving mill, the warp is usually already on a beam and the weft is on different size cops and cheeses.

Alternatively, if the loom had already run that cloth, a short length of the previous warp thread could be left on the healds and reed, and a Barber Colman knotter ties the old ends to the new.

The steam raised to 160 psi in the boiler house drives a 700 horsepower (520 kW) cross compound horizontal stationary steam engine, built by the Burnley Iron Works (formerly Marslands).The high-pressure cylinder (HP) is 17 inches (43 cm) and the low-pressure (LP) 39 inches (99 cm).

Some prospered, expanded and moved to Burnley and elsewhere; names such as Altham, Burrows, Emmott, Forster, Heasandford, Spencer, Thornton, and Walton.