Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: Flax Warehouse

Warehouse of around 1810, part of the former Shrewsbury Flaxmill designed by Charles Bage and operated by Marshall, Benyon and Bage. The flax mill was constructed in two major phases: 1796-7 and between 1809 and 1812, with later additions and alterations. The building was converted and extended to a maltings in 1897-8 and closed in 1987.

The warehouse is of iron-framed construction with walls of common or standard red bricks under a roof clad with Welsh slates and corrugated sheeting. It is rectangular on plan, aligned west to east, and forms part of a group of attached buildings comprising the Spinning Mill, Crossing Building and Flax Warehouse, all subsequently linked by the addition of a late 19th-century maltings kiln.

The building has four storeys plus an attic and is built to a wide plan of nine bays. A chamfered offset occurs at second-floor level. As is typical of a warehouse, windows are limited and irregularly arranged. The east gable wall has numerous cast-iron tie plates and an opening with segmental head at attic level. The south elevation has two segmental-arched doorways to the ground floor and a small window to the second and third floors. The top storey was linked to the upper floor of the Crossing Building by a chain suspension bridge, now removed, though the blocked doorway which gave access to it remains visible. The west gable wall shows evidence of new brickwork and has a ground-floor and first-floor window to the left-hand end and an inserted doorway to the left of centre. A further doorway at attic level formerly connected via a bridge to an adjacent mid-20th-century silo, since demolished in the early 21st century. Windows appear only within the western third of the north elevation, and a modern hoist tower clad in corrugated sheeting stands at the east end.

Internally, the floors are carried by four-piece beams jointed at the heads of three rows of supporting cast-iron columns, with longitudinal wrought-iron tie rods connecting the beam webs to either side of the columns. The floor beams represent key improvements over those in the Spinning Mill, being lighter and having an inverted-T cross section, a form that became widely used until the mid-19th century. The cruciform-section columns have slender scantling and delicately moulded bases and capitals. Shallow brick jack arches spring between the beams to form the ceilings. Several floors have openings in the south wall; some are infilled former windows while others are late-19th-century insertions relating to maltings operation, connecting to the adjacent kiln. Machinery survives in the form of drive shafts set within a wooden frame. The full-span cast-iron roof is integral with the iron frame and comprises two pairs of castings forming queen-strut trusses, cast-iron purlins and wooden rafters.

The corrugated sheeting clad hoist tower to the north side of the warehouse is not of special architectural or historic interest.