History of Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings
The main mill at Shrewbury Flaxmill Maltings is a landmark in the history of construction – the first building in the world to have a structural frame of iron and the ancestor of all iron- and steel-framed buildings. It was opened in about 1800 to spin fibre from flax plants into thread for making linen cloth, and operated as a spinning business for almost 90 years. After it closed, the site was adapted as a maltings, where hops were processed to make malt for beer.
The maltings closed in 1987, and after falling into disrepair the buildings were eventually rescued, repaired and restored by Historic England, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Flax spinning
The mill was built to spin and twist the fibres from the stems of the flax plant into yarn or thread. Flax, which can be grown in England and northern Europe, produces long fibres known as ‘line’ and short fibres called ‘tow’. A first process, heckling, separates the two so that they can then be processed and spun into yarn. Line flax produces a strong but fine thread, from which fine linen for tableware, bedsheets and clothing can be woven. Tow produces a coarser yarn, suitable for making heavier canvas and sailcloth.
Before the advent of mills, flax-spinning was a cottage industry, but the process of industrialising it began in the late 18th century. In 1787 John Kendrew and Thomas Porthouse patented machines for spinning yarn from flax, which were similar to Richard Arkwright’s water-frame – patented in 1769 – for spinning cotton thread. In 1809 machinery to carry out the heckling process was patented as well.
The partnership: Marshall, Benyon and Bage
It was the Yorkshire businessman John Marshall (1765–1845) who took the process further. After entering his father’s textile business he became a linen merchant, and began to investigate ways of industrialising flax-spinning. He was inspired by Arkwright’s success with industrialising cotton production – first using water power but by 1790 increasingly with steam engines – to do the same for linen, initially using Kendrew and Porthouse’s machinery.
In the early 1790s Marshall formed a partnership which developed spinning businesses near Leeds. But he needed capital to grow his business, and in 1793 he formed a new partnership with the brothers Thomas and Benjamin Benyon, wool merchants of Shrewsbury. The partners leased a flax-spinning mill in Leeds, and opened a second mill in 1795. This was damaged by fire on 13 February 1796 – a common problem at the time in timber-framed mills – but was rebuilt and recommenced operations in July.
In the same year, the Benyons and Marshall agreed to develop another mill at Ditherington, to the north of their home town. In June they brought in a new partner, Charles Bage (1751–1822), to design it.
Bage was part of a network of technological pioneers in Shropshire. While working as a wine merchant and a land surveyor, he developed an interest in engineering. He got to know the engineer Thomas Telford – then surveyor of roads for Shropshire – and Shrewsbury’s leading ironfounders, William Hazledine and the brothers William and Joseph Reynolds. He had a flair for mathematics, and a great understanding of the (still very novel) structural use of cast iron. Marshall and the Benyons took him on as a partner because of the skills and knowledge he had acquired to design a fireproof mill.
A pioneering design
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.
Three rows of cast iron columns run down each floor of the building. The columns are solid and cross-shaped in plan, following the model of those the mill owner William Strutt (1756–1830) had used in earlier cotton mills and a warehouse in Derbyshire – the first known use of iron columns in multi-storey buildings.
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.
Further buildings were added soon after the main mill was built. They include the Cross Mill, built in 1804 at right-angles to the main one, to house heckling and other preparatory processes. This has a similar iron frame. Several smaller buildings were also needed for the production process.
Charles Bage’s cast iron frame at Shrewsbury provided a pattern for future textile mills. A larger iron-framed cotton-spinning mill at Salford, near Manchester, for Phillips & Lee, built in 1800–01, developed the design for the iron frame, and was the first building in the world to be lit by gas. William Strutt built further iron-framed mills at Derby and Belper, adapting Bage’s design. Iron construction was developing fast as understanding of it evolved, but Shrewsbury Flaxmill has a central place in the story.
Steam power
The swift development of steam power transformed the effectiveness of mills. A Boulton and Watt steam engine was installed at the south end of the main mill in 1797. The furnace and boilers were in a wing that projected east towards the canal, which delivered the coal. A second engine, this time from a Leeds manufacturer, Matthew Murray, was installed at the north end of the main building in 1800.
Eventually these engines – which incorporated timber in their frames, beams and connecting rods – were replaced with more robust ones, and in 1810 a larger engine house was built at the south end of the mill.
Power from mill engines was normally transmitted by vertical drive-shafts, going the height of the building. These drove horizontal axles or drive-shafts, running the length of each floor. The square frames at the top of the central columns, which form a distinctive feature of the ground and third floors, were there to allow the horizontal drive-shafts to pass through them. Tensioned leather belts, attached to the drive-shaft, turned the individual machines.
The flax mill’s steam engines survived until the main mill closed in October 1886. After this, all the original machinery was stripped out.
The flax mill’s workforce
The hours and nature of work in the mill were determined by the steam-driven machines. Given a supply of coal, rotary motion could be generated from steam power for as long as was needed, while gas lighting – installed at the Shrewsbury mill in 1811 – meant that the mill could run in shifts for 24 hours a day. In the early 19th century it was normal for textile mills to be run for shifts of 12 hours or more.
The machines needed constant tending, but did not require as much physical strength or skill as hand-spinning. Almost all mills employed children, many of whom were poor children, often orphans, in the care of parish authorities, who were responsible for orphans and workhouses. The children were indentured (contracted out) to work in mills as ‘parish apprentices’. Many were housed, fed and given a basic education, but not paid, this being seen as a preparation for life. Apprentice houses were built near the mill at Shrewsbury in 1799 and 1811 to house child employees.
The use of parish apprentices was phased out by the Factory Act of 1833 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Nevertheless, employment of minors in mills remained universal. In the 1840s the Shrewsbury mill workforce peaked at around 800 workers; census information from 1851 suggests that over 55% were under 20 and around 35% under 16.
In the 1820s and 1830s, there were allegations that child workers in Marshall’s businesses were systematically ill-treated. The mill manager at Shrewsbury, Peter Horsman, was accused of regularly beating children as punishment for mistakes or drowsiness. There were many similar accusations relating to the company’s mills in Leeds.
In some ways Marshall & Company may have been better employers than many. In 1835 they were said to be the only factory in Shrewsbury to operate a 48-hour week and run a school for apprentices in the factory. However, there is no doubt that life for those working in the mill, children and adults, was very harsh in the early years, and continued to be arduous and monotonous for the rest of the company’s history.
The Flax Mill in Use
Marshall, Benyon and Bage dissolved their partnership in 1804, and divided the assets. Although Marshall lived in Leeds, where his other business interests were, he took over the Shrewsbury mill. The Benyons developed two more mills with iron-framed buildings, one of them only 580 metres from the Shrewsbury mill.
John Marshall was one of the most successful textile manufacturers of the day. Marshall & Company made linen thread in Shrewsbury and Leeds, wove it into cloth and bleached it. Specialised machinery was introduced at the Shrewsbury mill in the 1830s for wet-spinning, which made it easier to weave high-quality linen thread. In the 1830s and 1840s Marshall developed the mill to produce finely finished, coloured linen thread, which could be sold on bobbins as well as being used in bulk in the Leeds weaving sheds. Dyehouses were built beside the mill so that the thread could be coloured on site.
After Marshall’s death in 1845, his sons carried out a major reorganisation to turn the mills in Leeds and Shrewsbury into a more efficient, integrated business. The Shrewsbury mill and a bleaching works at Hanwood nearby were used to dye and finish yarns produced in Leeds, and Marshall’s Shrewsbury Thread became a well-known brand.
Despite these efforts, however, the company’s profitability began to decline in the 1850s. The Shrewsbury mill itself seems to have lost money in most years from 1862, and although it was re-equipped in about 1876 it fell into loss again in the face of strong domestic and foreign competition. The workforce had declined to about 300 by the late 1870s.
Eventually the family decided to close the Shrewsbury businesses. The flax mill closed on 23 October 1886, and the remaining 200 workers were paid off.
The mill as a maltings
The mill stood empty for about ten years until 1897, when William Jones & Son, a company of maltsters, bought it. They converted the buildings to make malt, an essential ingredient in beer.
To produce malt using the traditional floor malting process, barley is first steeped in water in a cistern, then spread out across the floor a few inches thick. This encourages it to germinate so that the starch in the grain is turned into sugar. At this point it is heated in kilns to complete its transformation into malt, then dressed, cleaned and bagged for distribution to breweries.
Various alterations were made to the buildings for this new use. The big open floors of the main mill and Cross Mill had their windows blocked for use as malt floors, as malting requires a minimal amount of light.
The major additions to the site were at the north end of the main mill – a large pyramid-roofed malt kiln, and a tower to contain grain elevators. Both the tower and the kiln survive. Later, big concrete silos were added to house barley and malt.
The Second World War
William Jones & Son went bankrupt in 1933–4, but the business was revived under the founder’s son, Richard.
During the Second World War the Shropshire Maltings was requisitioned by the army and used as a barracks for basic training of newly recruited infantry. It was ill-suited for this purpose: the recruits had to sleep on the large, open malt floors, with no proper bathing facilities. It was remembered as an austere and uncomfortable billet, and was nicknamed ‘the Rat Hotel’ by its residents.
In 1948 the company was taken over by Ansells, a large Birmingham-based brewer later part of Allied Breweries – hence the ‘Albrew’ sign on the gable end of the Cross Mill. It remained in use, but could not compete with large purpose-built maltings.
In 1987, a century after Marshall & Company closed their thread business, the site was closed down for the second time.
The mill rescued
The mill’s pioneering place in the history of iron construction had been recognised by a number of engineering historians in the 1950s and 1960s, and was reflected in the Grade I listed building status given to the Main Mill, Cross Mill and Flax Warehouse. In the decade after the maltings closed in 1987, developers put forward various schemes to convert and regenerate the site, all of which foundered, and the buildings fell into disrepair.
Eventually, in 2005, English Heritage acquired the freehold of the site, an exceptional step that acknowledged its international significance. A masterplan was developed to regenerate the site as a whole. When English Heritage was divided in 2015 into two bodies – Historic England and the new English Heritage charity – the former retained responsibility for the mill.
The main mill buildings presented particular problems, as Bage’s original design did not meet modern structural standards, and water ingress over the years had caused serious decay. Bage had over-fixed his iron frame, and some of the beams were cracked. The solution involved the insertion of a new steel grillage within the main building to take the loads from any new uses, leaving the historic iron frame just bearing its own weight.
Major repairs began in 2014, funded by grants from Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The steel grillage was inserted, the iron frame conserved, the brick shell repaired and the windows unblocked. The buildings were converted for a mixture of commercial use and public access.
In 2022 the mill – now known as Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings – was opened to the public, and from 1 April 2025 English Heritage is taking on its day-to-day management as a visitor destination.
Image gallery
Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings
The main mill
Apprentice House
Dyehouse roof struts
The Shrewsbury Maltings
Malting floor
Cross Mill
Malt kiln
Kiln roof
Jubilee Tower
Jubilee Tower coronet
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