Politics and International Relations trip to Armley Mills

One of my favourite parts of induction week is taking new students to Armley Mills, a brilliant industrial museum housed in what was once the world's largest woollen mill.

It’s become something of an annual ritual for us in Politics and International Relations, and a great opportunity for new students to get to know the rest of their year group.

It’s a great way for students to connect their studies to the city Leeds Beckett is part of, and to the broader history of modernity, the global economy, and political activism.

We take new students on a pleasant walk along the historic Leeds-Liverpool canal (usually in glorious sunshine). Staff, new students and current students, especially members of the Politics and International Relations (PIR) Society, all walk together along the towpath, before arriving at Armley Mills to tea, coffee and chocolate.

Once at the Mills, we head upstairs for a workshop, exploring the relevance of sites like Armley Mills to the making of the modern world, unravelling the complex processes that tie the English industrial revolution to fundamental transformations on a global scale.

After a short break, students then break into groups for a quiz about the idea of Freedom, which connects to the first big topic of the exciting module, Politics, Ethics and Justice.

Armley Mills is at the centre of a story of how technology and energy shape the social landscape, with the geography of the early industrial revolution following first waterways and later coal transportation, which determined where the industrial hubs – which became the great Northern cities – would be located.

It is a story of unrest and migration, as the largely rural Northern population were evicted from common land by the Enclosures Acts, forced to find work in the new factories, however poor the pay and conditions.

It is a story of the growth of the modern state, to manage the social consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation – from cholera and crime to popular unrest and political activism.

It is a story of colonialism, which both drove the industrial revolution as plunder needed to be invested, and was in turn driven by it, as the British Empire became a vital supplier of cheap raw materials, such as cotton, and (quite literally) captive markets to absorb industrial over-production.

The English industrial revolution, to which Armley Mills is a monument, reverberates through time to the present.

Its soot-stained fingerprints can be found all over the history of parliamentary democracy and popular sovereignty, climate change, European colonialism and its legacies, global capitalism and financialisaton, urbanisation, the acceleration of technology, migration and global inequality.

To the untrained observer, it may look like a mere museum, housing outdated machines long since out of use. But Armley Mills teaches us something fundamentally important: everything is connected, and everything – everything – is political. We may be distracted by the spectacle of war and the parlour games of Westminster; we may fall into the trap of seeing politics as a dry science of institutions and procedures, of polling data and predictive algorithms.

But the truth is that when we look at society properly, it is rich with lived and living histories of struggle; struggles over wealth, power, survival, and especially over ideas. These struggles are etched into the very landscape of our towns and cities. You just have to learn how to read them.

After discussing all of this together, staff and students are led by the Politics and International Relations society to a nearby pub, for the first of many social events we hope bring the student community together, forging friendship groups which will be a significant part of your degree and for many years after.