WHEN we think of mills it tends to be the Dark Satanic kind - soot-blackened temples of industry, with malnourished Victorian children darting beneath noisy looms scooping up cloth pieces.

But I grew up hearing the whistle of the mill across the road, where workers went through the gates, like a Lowry painting. And in the late 1980s I too worked in an old mill one summer.

They were everywhere, those vast stone buildings, with huge chimneys towering on the skyline. In Bradford’s industrial heyday, when the district led the world in textile manufacturing, there were hundreds of mills here, employing whole communities. Today, the whistles no longer blow at those old factories. Some have burned down, others stand empty and weed-choked, and some live on as apartments, arts complexes and business sites.

This weekend our mill history will be celebrated at Heritage Open Day events at Bradford Industrial Museum - itself a former textile mill. Shipley-based 509 Arts will be sharing stories gathered over the past year from people who worked in Bradford’s mills in the late 20th century. The Lost Mills and Ghost Mansions project, carried out with BCB, has generated interviews, radio programmes and workshops that will become an online archive and learning resource. The memories of participants tell the story of the last decades of Bradford’s textile history.

“There were once over 350 working mills in Bradford - almost every family in the district was connected to the textile industry in some way.” says Alan Dix, artistic director of 509 Arts. “Mill buildings were everywhere; Barkerend, Listers, Dalton in Keighley, Salts, Albany and many more were household names.

“In the last 50 years, many of them have closed. Today there are less than 20 and the rest have been demolished or repurposed. Some, sadly, have burned to the ground. Bradford’s great textile buildings and the people who worked in them are slowly disappearing.”

When Alan visited a school near Lister Mills and asked “What’s that building at the top of the hill” he got blank looks. “Something to do with wool?” a child suggested.

These mill buildings, and the old houses around them, are our heritage. Like many people in this region, I’m from a family of mill-workers. My grandma and my aunts all worked in carpet mills in Halifax, and before them came generations of textile workers and cottage weavers.

People who settled in Bradford from Eastern Europe, Italy and the Indian subcontinent came here to work in the mills. Now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, they are the grandparents and great grandparents of younger generations who weren’t around when the mills swallowed up whole communities.

When Drummonds Mill burned down in 2016, reducing 150 years of Bradford history to rubble, people were in tears. They recalled their own time there, or their parents working there. Drummonds was a landmark building, a huge employer, and its loss was felt deeply.

It’s always sad to lose a mill building. Is that because we romanticise them, when in reality they were often harsh, cruel, dangerous workplaces? My elderly aunt says mill work was one of the best times of her life, and still speaks fondly of the women she worked with. But her sister loathed it and forever resented being sent to work there. My grandma was a mill-girl at 13 and told me was terrified of the place. Her friend lost a finger on the machinery.

There was nothing romantic about mill work. But it’s a hugely significant part of our local heritage. Thanks to projects like Lost Mills and Ghost Mansions, stories of mill life, from those who still remember it, will be preserved - so this “living history” doesn’t end up either lost or a ghost.