A FEW years ago I stood in the great weaving shed of Drummond Mill, a vast space that once shook with life and industry.

Whole families worked there, husbands and wives met there, and the mighty mill tower has long been part of Bradford's skyline. So it wasn't surprising to hear that people were in tears at the news of last week's terrible fire that destroyed the old mill.

"It feels like a bereavement," said a friend whose father worked there for 40 years. Carol Marshall, landlady of the nearby Barracks Tavern pub, told the T&A: "I feel like I've lost my arm. My customers have been asking on Facebook if they can come for a pint before the City game. I was in tears reading their comments."

In 2011 I visited Drummond Mill to watch a play about its workforce. The Mill - City of Dreams was presented by Freedom Studios, which spent 18 months interviewing former mill-workers, and the result was a powerful human story of the region’s industrial history.

The smell of wool grease lingered as we followed the actors around the old mill, watching real-life stories of three workers unfold. There was a displaced Ukrainian man, traumatised by labour camps, a young Italian woman with broken English, and a Pakistani engineering student, juggling shifts, studies and snatched sleep in a cramped shared house.

Wandering down long corridors, past offices with desks still intact, it felt as though the workers had just left for the day. The air was filled with the noise of looms clattering and workers chattering, and items salvaged from the building, including lengths of cloth, added an eerie sense of reality. It was a fascinating, moving journey, both epic and intimate, through a remarkable building that sadly no longer exists.

And for many people, particularly those with family roots in the mills, that leaves a huge sense of loss.

But are we guilty of romanticising the past when we cling to old mill buildings of the North? Mills and factories were often grim, cruel places, especially in the 19th century when child labour was rife.

If I traced the Yorkshire side of my family over the past two centuries, most would have been mill-workers. My grandma was a mill girl aged 12, she used to tell me she dreaded the deafening noise and each morning would beg her mother not to send her. She hated it so much she still spoke of it in her 90s. One of my aunts speaks fondly of mill work and the friendships it brought, largely through lip-reading conversations across whirring machinery. "The married women talked about everything; I had my 'life education' at that mill," she mused. But her sister shudders at the memory and still feels bitter that she, a grammar school girl with prospects, was sent to work in a carpet mill, a place she loathed.

My partner, whose father spent his working life in a textile mill, said: “He hated the place. He’d have razed them all to the ground if he’d had the chance.”

If I'd been born a few decades earlier, I'd have been a mill girl too. Instead, my experience of factory work was student summers spent packing crisps and shampoo. And I admit, I hated it.

Today, Yorkshire’s mill buildings are relics of the past; some transformed into apartments, shops, offices and galleries, others standing empty. The stories and memories of mill-workers should rightly be cherished and preserved, but let’s not forget that, for many, the reality of these palaces of industry was a lifetime of back-breaking graft.