The Silk Mill

SP 9211 11/51

TRING, BROOK STREET (West side), The Silk Mill

II

Silk textile mill complex, now light engineering factories. 1824 for William Kay who bought the Manor of Tring in 1823, run by his brother from Macclesfield but leased to David Evans & Co. after 4 years and worked up to 1898. Mill reduced to 3-storeys in early C20, and stair tower built against front in 2nd World War when floors strengthened by steel beams below old floors. Red brick with slate roofs, E front of W range now painted. A courtyard complex with tall W range 150 x 35ft originally of 5 floors but now of 3, lower S range of 2 and 3 floors 100 x 35ft, and the long single-storey E range facing the mill and backing onto Brook Street built to lodge children working in the mill, later used as offices and workshops. The N range has brick walls, timber floors of joists with boards below and above carried on heavy timber cross-beams linked by lesser beams, and pitched roof on re-used original wide-span queen-post timber trusses. Wide eaves soffit and projected verge both on shaped brackets and cantilevered purlins and wallplates. Close-spaced rows of uniform windows with gauged brick cambered arches and wooden small-paned recessed windows, some with central 1/3 a top-hung opening light. Step in W wall at vertical brick shaft perhaps for belting. Aqueduct runs at high level on W side of mill and an enclosed large iron waterwheel 22ft diameter and 6ft wide survives in situ at junction of W end S ranges. Lying E-W it revolved clockwise as viewed from N, has buckets, iron cross-bracing, and heavy 4-flanged iron axle. The drive is taken from a rack along the rim. S range has tall 2-storeys and basement hipped roof block at E end facing the road which is designed to appear as a 3-windows long symmetrical house in red brick with cambered gauged arches, stone sills, broad giant stucco pilasters at each end above plinth with paired brackets, single at each end. Recessed sash windows with 15/10 small panes and 3-centred gauged arch to central doorway with threshold 1m above pavement. Half-glazed door and 8-pane basement windows. This building has painted brick interior walls and a wide relieving arch across the rear wall where it adjoins a 2-storeys warehouse with wooden roof trusses and ground higher on S side so that it appears as single storey. The W part of the S range is a taller engine house with pilastered S wall, 5 windows in the N wall facing the yard, a glazed top-hamper to the iron framed roof, and massive vaulted base last used to support electrical generators but former square brick chimney to NW now demolished. When described in 1840 there was a 25hp steam engine and 16hp of water power, 500 pairs of hands consisting of 40 men, 140 women and 320 children. Gerald Massey the Chartist poet and prototype of Felix Holt in George Eliot's novel entered the mill here in 1836 aged eight. (Branch Johnson(1970)67-70, 177).

Listing NGR: SP9253311884