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PROJECT REPORT: HERITAGE & HISTORIC
MIXED PROGRAMME
The restored building has four floors of cross-ventilated workspace, and a museum on the ground floor
for structural frames. He designed a grid of iron columns and beams, with 3 x 17 rows of columns on each floor, plus masonry jack arches completing the structural frame. The beams holding the floors were built in two bolted-together sections. When the mill opened the following year, it was heralded as the world’s first iron-framed building, as well as the first purpose-built fire-proof structure, brick clad and creating the blueprint that would be adopted for much taller metal-framed buildings in coming decades.
The adjacent canal also opened in 1797, bringing in coal and taking away finished flax for the next 100 years, but the linen industry declined at the turn of the 20th century, and the mill fell into disuse. It was repurposed as a maltings, because the slim columns afforded the new owners the large floor areas needed to dry barley (its net internal area is 4181 m2
). Malting
required humidity, light and ventilation to be controlled, so most of the windows were bricked up.
The final addition was the Jubilee
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Tower, ironically built in timber and holding machinery to move barley from floor to floor. It was clad with an ornate iron coronet to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
The building was also used as a barracks during the Second World War, and by the mid 1980s, it again fell into disuse, as modern malting processes took over. It was Grade 1 listed in the 1950s, having been regularly visited as a design landmark, but as project architect Tim Greensmith explains, it became “largely forgotten” as the century progressed – “it sat there with people not knowing what to do next.”
The case for development FCBStudios were instrumental in advocating for and driving forward this complex restoration project, working with Historic England from the project’s inception in around 2010. “Report after report identified this site as key to any regeneration of the northern corridor of Shrewsbury,” explains Greensmith. “However, it was a difficult
ADF FEBRUARY 2024
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