North Street is one of Landmark’s quiet gems.

To stay here is to stay in an important piece of history, because North Street is the earliest planned industrial housing in the world and the finest of its type ever built – vastly superior to that of the next century, and now lying at the heart of a designated World Heritage Site. It was built in 1771 by Richard Arkwright to house his mill workers, and named after the Prime Minister. The three-storey gritstone houses have one room on each floor, with a room for framework-knitting in the attic. Each has a small garden and an allotment at a distance.

In 1974, the Ancient Monuments Society, with then unfashionable foresight, bought six of the houses to save them from demolition. We took them on from the Society, then bought a further three houses on the same side of the street and re-roofed and improved all nine, restoring the long windows of the attic workrooms. One house with a particularly well-preserved interior (No.10) we repaired as a Landmark so that people can experience and reflect upon the living quarters of these earliest of factory workers. Their lot was perhaps a gentler one than that of later workers, but you may still find yourself touched and inspired.

Cromford is an excellent little town, with a fascinating and ongoing local project to restore Arkwright’s mills. The area is full of interest for those absorbed by industrial archaeology, while nearby Bolsover, Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth cater for those with a taste for the more polite. The Derby Dales and Cromford Canal offer good walking, and then there is Matlock, a genuine inland resort, at whose petrifying wells you can have your bowler hat turned into stone.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 4