Hannah Greg, with her husband Samuel Greg, was the architect of a paternalistic industrial community in the north of England, a prominent Unitarian and significant diarist. While her husband Samuel Greg pioneered new ways of running a cloth mill, she supervised the housing and conditions of the employees, including the education of the child workers. The Gregs, despite family connections to the slave trade, were considered enlightened employers for the time, and though in the 1830s the apprentice system was questioned, Quarry Bank Mill maintained it until her death.

Samuel Greg was an Irish-born industrialist and entrepreneur of the early Industrial Revolution and a pioneer of the factory system. He built Quarry Bank Mill, which at his retirement was the largest textile mill in the country. He and his wife Hannah Greg assumed welfare responsibilities for their employees, many of whom were children, building a model village alongside the factory. At the same time, Greg inherited and operated a slave plantation in the West Indies where he tortured slaves by whipping them.