Sellers Wheel

Sellers Wheel is a cutlery works comprising offices, warehouse, and workshops, with grinding rooms (or hulls), now converted to joinery works and retail warehouse. Built in the later 19th century, it is constructed of brick, painted, with slate roofs and brick stacks.

The building follows a rectangular courtyard plan with ranges on all four sides. The front range to Arundel Street, the former office and warehouse, is three storeys and ten bays wide, with one ridge stack and a gable stack to the right. It has a stone-capped plinth and a cart entrance in the eighth bay from the left (north-east end), with a segmental head and flanking stone pilasters supporting an entablature. Flanking the cart entrance are two pedestrian doorways with plain stone surrounds; the doorway in the seventh bay is now partially blocked to form a window, and a doorway has been inserted in the second bay (formerly a window). The ground floor has rectangular windows with brick flat-arch heads and stone sills. Continuous stone sill bands run across the first and second floors, with rectangular windows of similar design but shorter on the second floor, except above the cart entrance which has tripartite windows with plain stone surrounds divided by stone mullions. The ground and first floors have 12-pane sashes; the second floor has 9-pane sashes. The second-floor window in the seventh bay from the left is blind. Modern external shutters have been added to ground-floor windows.

The return to Brown Lane continues the sill bands, with two 12-pane sashes to the first floor and two 9-pane sashes to the second floor. The south-west return is blind except for two high-level ventilators and one modern low-level ventilator.

The south-west return workshop wing reduces in height from three storeys to two, then to one storey, with a stack at the latter junction, and has a blind rear wall with a monopitch roof. The courtyard elevation contains two-light and three-light casement windows with segmental brick heads and a segmental-headed doorway to the left of the two-storey section.

The north-east workshop range to Brown Lane is three storeys wide (originally four, but reduced in height) and sixteen bays wide to the second floor, with a stack at its junction with the front range. The ground floor features a series of cast-iron ventilation grilles with stone sills and segmental brick heads, indicating the location of grinding hulls: three survive unaltered, four are blocked, and two have been lengthened into single-light windows. A doorway has been inserted below a grille at the left. The final bay to the left has a window with a stone sill and semi-circular brick head, perhaps indicating the former position of an engine. The left (eastern) half of the first floor contains five similar ventilation grilles indicating grinding hull positions. The right (western) half of the first floor has eight two-light windows with 10-pane timber casements, segmental brick heads, and a continuous stone sill; the easternmost window is now blocked. The second floor has sixteen similar windows above a continuous stone sill, slightly irregularly spaced, with three-light windows in bays one, two, seven and eight from the left. The courtyard elevation has eaves stacks, two-light and three-light windows with segmental brick heads above continuous stone sills at all three levels, and segmental-headed doorways into grinding hulls, with the upper one reached by an external stair. A vehicular entrance with part-glazed double doors is probably a later insertion.

The south-east range, which originally contained a rear yard range, has been replaced by a tall single-storey range, probably of early 20th-century date.

The interior retains fireproof construction with cast-iron columns and beams supporting shallow brick-arched vaulting to the former grinding hulls. Traces of the outline of grinding troughs survive on the floor surface of the first floor, with evidence of line shafting along the rear wall.

The building was occupied by the firm John Sellers and Sons, manufacturers of pen and pocket knives, razors, table cutlery, and electro-plated goods, from around 1893 into the 20th century. Map evidence reveals that in 1896 the south-east, rear range comprised a steam power plant and forge shops, now replaced.