Come with me for a fascinating local visit to the first high rise building in the world that used steel to build upwards for strength & safety.
My cousin Lorraine, who also has a passion for history, joined me for a fascinating morning tour of the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings site.
It is a grade 1 listed building standing 5 storeys high with an elegant crown on top of the tower.
It is a local landmark on the outskirts of our county town of Shrewsbury & was saved from neglect by a dedicated team of fundraisers & English Heritage.
It is a few miles away from the world heritage Ironbridge, which was the first Iron bridge ever built in the world. The processes of casting iron for a loadbearing structure led to the Industrial Revolution world wide & advanced buildings techniques. It all started in a little gorge in a relatively quiet part of England but the repercussions were felt world wide.
At a time of the 'dark satanic mills' of William Blake's famous poetry, mills were dangerous places with crowded conditions of over 800 worker, some child labour, long hours, unsafe working conditions & often death by limbs being caught in the machinery or by the fires that swept the buildings where fragments of wool, or fabrics were in the air & were easily ignited. This brick & metal structural building was a massive improvement on the timber factories that caught fire so easily when flying fluff was ignited so easily by the candles used to light up the factories.
The Shrewsbury Flaxmill was built from 1796 -1800 to make threads for linen from flax.
I did not know that flax comes from the linseed plant & that the top seeds on the stems were cut off to be pressed for flax / linseed oil. I have oiled furniture with it without knowing anything about the plant.
Several processes were needed to produce the flax from the tough stems & to make them pliable enough for weaving in to essential fabrics with a sailcloth / canvas like property that was used on ships sails (when coated to make them waterproof) or even on early airplane construction using fabric. It was also used for linen clothing, furnishings etc. A versatile but expensive thread because of the many processes to get it to a workable, useable thread.
This mill used technology from the nearby Ironbridge to make the building frame from iron, thus reducing the chance of the mill catching fire as so many had. The defunct Shropshire Union canal had a branch that ran alongside the mill & provided access to water & the transport of materials more easily.
Construction of the mill began in 1796, on a site next to the newly built Shrewsbury Canal, which was used to bring in raw materials and coal. The building was complete by 1800.
Externally, it looks much like other textile mills of the age: a plain brick shell, five storeys high, with regular rows of windows. The building is about 12 metres wide and 54 metres long. Each floor is a single long, open space. The outer walls, around 2 feet (0.6 metres) thick, are of load-bearing brick. The internal frame is the first multi-storey structural frame to be made entirely of iron in history, so is the ancestor of all iron- and steel-framed buildings in the world.
The columns and beams for the frame were cast in the foundry set up by William Hazledine in 1789 at Coleham, near Shrewsbury. Hazledine was highly regarded – the engineer Thomas Telford called him a ‘magician’ – and his company’s first known job was to make cast iron columns for the new parish church of St Chad, Shrewsbury (1790–92). Hazledine later supplied Thomas Telford with components for his famous aqueduct, the Pontcysyllte near Llangollen, and for his bridge spanning the Menai Strait between Anglesey and mainland Wales, then the longest suspension bridge in the world.
The large array of buildings also had vast dye rooms where the cloth was dyed using plant materials; these rooms are sadly lost to time.
When the mills declined, the buildings were taken over by maltings companies to process barley in to malt for beer making. The buildings underwent changes with steam rooms & additional spaces.
During WWII, the buildings housed soldiers before returning to their malting processes again. The soldiers billeted there nicknamed it the 'Rat Hotel' because rats were a plague where barley was stored & they could get in & feast happily on it. Cats were introduced to the site but they were not as effective as Jack Russel dogs which were better rat catchers. People were also employed as rat catchers to protect the barley from these pests.
The outside of the building gives up its history & our fascinating tour guide pointed out the different brick sizes.
Bricks were taxed per 1000 so the brickyards made larger bricks & part of the original building had 2 sizes of bricks showing the way they tried to get around the brick tax (much the same as windows were bricked up when a window tax was introduced).
The larger bricks were the older ones & when enough tax wasn't raised on bricks, all bricks were taxes by number which was a blow to the brickmakers who had innovated to protect their livelihoods.
Commercial names are still visible on the back of the buildings, a reminder of the changing history of the buildings.
Apprentices were housed in an adjacent building, often quite young & they were used as cheap labour or families encouraged young people to seek work when things were tough.
They were given food, one set of clothes a year & a basic education. Many poor, orphans or workhouse children were 'apprenticed' to such places.
The apprentice building still has to be restored but its solid brick structure a reminder of times when children worked from quite a young age.
It is possible that the girls & boys each occupied a different floor with meals taken downstairs with a person in charge of them all.
The cast iron support beams on the main building are fascinating - cast so they were slightly bulged in the centre for the weight but in long rows of 3, with the centre one having a space for the mechanisms to pass through. The 4th floor has plainer beams while the the top floor, the 5th, had the interesting ones with the shape down the centre line.
The columns at the Shrewsbury mill were placed around 3 metres (10 feet) apart, reflecting standard practice in comparable timber-framed structures, and carry iron beams. Shallow brick vaults were built between the beams to form the floors, which have cement surfaces. Together, these elements made a fireproof structure.
The ceilings are vaulted & it has a long line of windows each side in varying sizes. Light was essential for working long shifts during the time it was both a mill & malting.
The engine house built in 1810 at the southern end of the main spinning mill. It had a 60-horsepower steam engine installed to power the flax-spinning machinery, replacing the original engine. The projecting timber hoist tower was added in 1897 as part of the conversion to a maltings
The buildings also show their numerous additions with the wooden structures that housed the steam engine.
There is an image of a working flax mill & of a maltings online
The crown atop of the Jubilee tower was an original 'flat pack' cast iron design that was assembled on site originally & it as restored as part of the mill restoration.
It is a local landmark, the tower with its elegant crown. I will visit on a weekend when tower visits are open as I think the view from up high will be amazing.
It was an absolutely fascinating morning doing the tour & taking in the local history of a place I had passed often since it was saved from ruin about 10 years ago. A visit was definitely overdue.
I am always immensely proud of Shropshire, the county of my maternal great great grandfather where innovation was found & which spread out world wide.
We take too much for granted now with cheap fabrics & throw away clothing; the efforts to innovate & provide in the time when everything was expensive is not appreciated.
I hope you have enjoyed this visit with me, do stop by again soon,
Dee 📚👑🧱🏭🏫
