Axminster Building

Former boiler house and drying house, later warehouse and offices, dating to 1853. The building is constructed of hammer dressed stone with a hipped slate roof.

The structure is aligned north-south, positioned south of 'A' Mill and west of 'E' Mill within the Dean Clough complex. It comprises three storeys with the lowest floor partially below ground level to the north, plus an attic floor.

The east elevation contains nine bays. The upper two storeys follow a consistent pattern from south to north: six tall rectangular windows, a bay with loading doors, then two further windows. The loading bay features a gable rising above the roof line and a hoist above the top door at attic level. The ground floor has a series of four arched windows and an arched entrance with small arched openings between them, the southernmost bays being blank.

The north elevation has a broad arched opening at ground level to the right with an entrance above, and two levels of altered openings to the left with traces of a second arch. Entrance doors on the second floor and attic level are accessed via an external metal staircase. The west elevation contains a ground floor entrance north of centre, nine windows to the second floor and two to the first floor, with evidence of other windows that have been blocked. Scars of the former north light roof of the weaving shed are visible on this elevation. The south elevation is blank.

Internally, the ground floor contains a row of cast iron columns supported by heavy steel pillars and beams. The first floor also has cast iron columns with evidence of altered openings to the north and visible timber ceiling beams. The second floor has cast iron columns and has been partly partitioned by glazed timber screens into office spaces. The attic floor is open with a roof structure of A trusses supported on iron columns to the sides, with skylights along the roof apex.

The building was originally constructed as a four storey boiler house and drying house at the north-eastern end of the New Shed, a single storey weaving shed built in 1853 over the former mill dam south of 'A' and 'B' Mills and east of 'C' Mill. A plan of 1871 shows two boilers positioned side by side with an external staircase to the north and an exit to a yard to the east. The drying floors above the boilers utilised the heat generated. By 1871, an extension of the weaving shed had been built to the east, and by 1937 the boiler house was enclosed on three sides by other buildings. The eastern shed and part of the New Shed were later used for Axminster carpet weaving, from which the building takes its current name.

The original New Shed was largely rebuilt after the Second World War following the collapse of the original roof. The boiler house was subsequently converted for use as warehousing with an upper floor partitioned to form offices. Carpet production ceased in 1982 after a gradual decline following the merger of John Crossley & Sons with Carpet Trade Holdings and the Carpet Trades Manufacturing Company of Kidderminster. The weaving sheds were demolished in the early twenty-first century, leaving the former boiler house extant but unused.

The building is a rare survival of this stage of the mid-nineteenth century carpet manufacturing process, other evidence of which has been lost or rebuilt in the twentieth century. It retains an external hoist and loading doors as evidence of its later use as a warehouse, and arched entrances for the original boilers as well as cast iron columns supporting the floors. It forms part of the nationally important Dean Clough Mills complex and has group value with the other listed structures on the site.