Bishop's Cleeve, Gloucestershire

This tiny structure – almost too small to be a building – is in a courtyard car park in the centre of Bishop’s Cleeve, a village that has expanded since the 1970s to become a dormitory settlement for Cheltenham. It’s surprising amongst the shops and houses to find an industrial building, for this is a wheelwright’s furnace, where iron rims were heated before being attached to wooden cart wheels and dunked in a trough of water so that they shrunk to fit. But every place of any size once had its wheelwright, a craftsman who had to be skilled in both wood- and metalwork, and who would mend buckets or do joinery when no wheels were needed.

Curiously, this furnace is dated to around 1910, which seems rather late for iron wheel rims. John Boyd Dunlop patented his pneumatic rubber tyre in 1888 and it caught on quickly. But old wooden-wheeled carts were used for decades afterwards, even though the iron rim and its furnace were already old technology in 1910. How fortunate that this relic of industrial technology has been preserved – appropriately bound with iron bars, presumably by the wheelwright himself.