Edward Potts (2 March 1839 – 15 April 1909) was an architect who practised in
Oldham
Oldham is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the Pennines on elevated ground between the rivers River Irk, Irk and River Medlock, Medlock, southeast of Rochdale, and northeast of Manchester. It is the administrative cent ...
,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated ''Lancs'') is a ceremonial county in North West England. It is bordered by Cumbria to the north, North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire to the east, Greater Manchester and Merseyside to the south, and the Irish Sea to ...
, England.
Biography
Potts was born on 2 March 1839 in
Bury, Lancashire
Bury (, ) is a market town on the River Irwell in the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, Greater Manchester, England. which had a population of 81,101 in 2021 while the wider borough had a population of 193,846.
The town was originally part of the ...
. He moved to
Oldham
Oldham is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the Pennines on elevated ground between the rivers River Irk, Irk and River Medlock, Medlock, southeast of Rochdale, and northeast of Manchester. It is the administrative cent ...
and designed many of the town's
Cotton mills and was ranked with
P. S. Stott as the greatest mill architect of Victorian Lancashire. Potts and his partnerships were responsible for the design and build of 200 mills, sixteen of which were in Oldham.
One such mill is
Textile Mill, Chadderton built in 1882.
Mills of this period were constructed with fireproof floors. These were principally triple brick arches, but Potts pioneered the use of 7" thick
concrete
Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...
floors. On 3 March 1884 he attempted to patent this new method of constructing
fireproof floors and ceilings. The patent was rejected, and it was rapidly adopted by other architects. The seven inch floor was more rigid than a 12" brick floor, so preserved the alignment of the
spinning mules, thus saving power. However the concrete floor however required a closer grouping of supporting columns, which restricted the size of the machines. To solve this, he introduced transverse steel girders into the design, supported on steel lintels above the windows. Thus there was no lateral thrust on the walls, and the windows became square headed and abnormally wide.
[
Potts moved to Eccles in 1891 and was responsible for the design of the town's library. He was a Liberal member of Eccles borough council from 1902 to 1905, the first chairman of the town's library committee in 1904 and a Justice of the Peace in 1906. He inaugurated popular Saturday night concerts during the winter months, and, keen to reduce the incidence of infant mortality, gave a ]sovereign
''Sovereign'' is a title that can be applied to the highest leader in various categories. The word is borrowed from Old French , which is ultimately derived from the Latin">-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to ...
to the mother of every child who reached the age of one.
He died on 15 April 1909 and was buried at Chadderton Cemetery.
Partnerships
*Woodhouse & Potts (1860–1872)
*Independent architect (1872–1880)
*Potts, Pickup & Dixon (1880–1890), Manchester office from 1882
*Potts, Son & Henning, Manchester, Oldham, and Bolton (1890–1907)[
]
See also
* List of mills in Chadderton
References
Notes
Bibliography
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Potts, Edward
1839 births
1909 deaths
19th-century English architects
People from Bury, Greater Manchester
People from Oldham
Architects from Lancashire