For more than 250 years, the Stroud valleys were the centre of a vast global wool and textile empire. More than 100 mills, lining the watery M4 of the Georgian world - the Cotswold Canals, supplied the British Army with its famous redcoats, created world leading billiard cloth, crossed the globe as trade goods and made their owner rich beyond their wildest dreams, provided they didn't go bankrupt first. A byproduct of the industry even created the great British lawn.

The looms may have gone, but the mills, the canals and the great houses, live on. Come with me on an hour online tour charting the rise and fall of this once huge industry, and how the mills reinvented themselves, again and again and again.