Blackened brick cotton mills line Redhill Street and Jersey Street beside the Rochdale Canal, where Netflix's The Stranger used the archway at Royal Mill.
What Ancoats looks like
Long mill buildings run five to eight storeys on and , blackened brick over cast iron frames with rows of small paned windows in arched openings. The Rochdale Canal runs behind them, its towpath narrow between the brick walls and the water.
Old Mill, Decker Mill and New Mill face the canal at , a cobbled lane running between them under a covered iron walkway that links the upper floors. A short block over on Jersey Street, a taller mill runs the length of the road to a corner tower at the far end.
Royal Mill is the newer of the group, with an arched brick entrance on Redhill Street and ROYAL MILL cut into the stone above it. runs alongside the mill block. Ground floors hold flats and a coffee shop behind painted panel windows, with a former corner pub nearby converted into live work units.
New brick apartment blocks stand near Bengal Street beside older corner pubs, on sites cleared within the past decade. An iron towpath footbridge crosses the canal opposite Brownsfield Mill, one of several still standing from the same period along this stretch.
Shot in Ancoats
Adam meets Suzanne at Ancoats Coffee Co in The Stranger, on the ground floor of Royal Mill. The archway the production filmed through opens off Redhill Street toward the canal, with ROYAL MILL cut into the stone above it.
The Stranger, 2020
Adam meets Suzanne at Ancoats Coffee Co, on the ground floor of Royal Mill on Redhill Street. The archway the production filmed through leads from the street to the canal side, with ROYAL MILL cut into the stone above the opening. Street View
What Ancoats can double for
Boott Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts
Boott Mills and the Merrimack canal district carry the same run of multi storey brick cotton mills with small paned windows that Ancoats does, most of them raised between the 1830s and 1890s. The scale of the buildings and their canal side setting are close enough to hold up in a wide shot. Boott Mills keeps a saw tooth roofline and taller stair towers visible in a wide shot, which Ancoats does not have, so a tighter frame on the brick and window bays holds the match better than a full building elevation. Try searching brick cotton mill canal building now.
Dozens of brick silk mills from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries line the raceways at the Great Falls Historic District, in the same deep red brick and arched window openings as Redhill Street. Paterson was built for water powered industry the same way Ancoats was, off a river rather than a canal. The raceway channels run narrower and more stepped than the Rochdale Canal, so a shot that keeps the water out of frame or holds tight on one building reads closer to Ancoats. Try searching brick silk mill raceway building now.
Manayunk grew up the same way, a canal built to power mills that now stand as converted lofts above a working retail street. The run of the buildings along the water follows a similar pattern to Ancoats, mill after mill down the same stretch. Manayunk's mills are built of local stone rather than brick, so a wide shot gives the difference away, best kept to a distant pass along the canal rather than a close building elevation. Try searching stone mill canal building now.
