[240]
and seventy; every one of which is twenty-two inches in front, and is the freehold property of the manufacturer who occupies it, who can transfer it to any other manufacturer, (at a premium of about 16l.) provided he have served a regular apprenticeship to the making of mixed cloth; without which service no one can be admitted. The white cloth hall contains one thousand two hundred and ten stands, upon the same plan as the other. The hour of sale in the mixed cloth hall is from half-past eight to half-past nine ; in the white cloth ditto from a quarter before ten to a quarter before eleven.
But exclusive of the cloth trade, Leeds is brought upon a par with our first commercial towns by several other considerable manufactories. One for the making of sail-cloth employs nearly eighteen hundred people. The cotton-mill, belonging to Messrs. Coupland, Wilkinson, and Coupland, is a concern of great extent; its grand and complicated operations, carried on by the power of one vast steam-engine, built by Mr. Murray, of Leeds, performing the work of forty horses, by machinery as beautiful and neat as that of a watch. Potteries and carpet manufactories also contribute to increase the riches of the town, whose advantages are rendered incalculable by rivers and canals, and inexhaustible mines of admirable coals on every side.
