Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Hidden industry 1: Cereal healing

The riverside town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire has a long history and has been well known for several things – for its magnificent abbey church (a place of pilgrimage for anyone interested in Norman or Gothic architecture), for the Battle of Tewkesbury (which in 1471 was one of the turning points of the Wars of the Roses), for its mustard (thick and hot like Poins in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2*), for the picturesque mixture of timber-framed and brick architecture in its main streets. Look a little more deeply, though, and walk down two narrow streets called Red Lane and Back of Avon, and you find the remains of industrial Tewkesbury, and they’re impressive.

As in many towns, brewing was done in Tewkesbury on an industrial scale; as in numerous riverside settlements, boat-building was an essential activity. But the big industry in Tewkesbury was milling flour. There were earlier flour mills,† but the really large mill was Healing’s Borough Flour Mills, originally built for Samuel Healing by W. H. James in 1865 and expanded in various directions over the years.§ By the 1890s it was enormous and was said to be the largest flour mill in the world. Grain came in, and flour poured out, via the adjacent river, by rail, and by road. Water transport was still being used in the 1990s, with two barges regularly taking on grain imported from France and Germany at the Sharpness canal and carrying it to Tewkesbury. Although today most of the traffic on the Avon and Severn is pleasure craft and the railway has gone, the attractive and rather delicate iron road bridge into the mill remains, lovingly restored. The vast mill itself, however, closed in 2006 and now stands empty, with grass sprouting from the parapets and weeping willows surrounding and hiding the prodigious corrugated-metal extensions and silos on the far side.

What remains is still impressive: tall red brick walls, windowless for long stretches, relieved here and there by a little diaper-work, window arches, and cornice decoration in contrasting blue bricks; slate roofs; stone string courses; and a well carved stone giving the mill’s name and, for those with good eyesight, its date of original construction. There’s also a certain amount of additional equipment such as hoists. On a sunny day, the mill still manages to look impressive and not too heavily scarred by time and neglect. One hopes that a use can be found for it, so that it can remains, not simply as a bit of decaying history but also as an important asset to the town, just as it was for about 140 years.

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* See Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, Act II scene 1i, line 240, were Falstaff says of Poins: ‘He a good wit? Hang him, baboon! his wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard, there’s no more conceit in him than is in a mallet.’

† There was a medieval water mill, known as Town Mill, somewhere near here, perhaps on this site, although this is not certain. Another early mill, the Abbey Mill, is a little further downstream and I hope to cover this in another post shortly.

§ Structural strengthening and extension in 1889, further extension in the 1930s, and further modifications in the 1970s–1980s; but large parts of the Victorian structure survive.