In the summer of 2006, I travelled from my home in Leeds, England to my birthplace in Chester, Pennsylvania. But instead of doing what I usually does - a journey by car across Northern England and by plane over the North Atlantic Ocean - I rode my bicycle down the old path by my house leading to Armley Mills Industrial Museum and then the 127 miles along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal to Liverpool, where I boarded a container ship. Nine days and 3500 miles later I arrived in Chester.
During the 19th century, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal brought goods back and forth from Leeds to the rest of the world. The plantations in the US exported cotton through Liverpool into the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Armley Mills was itself the largest woollen mill in the world.
