Pound Street Malthouse

Pound Street Malthouse, Warminster

This is a 18th-century malthouse, substantially altered and rebuilt in 1879 for the Morgan family of maltsters, constructed in typical local materials. It remains in use as a floor maltings today.

The building comprises two storeys organised around two ranges at right angles to the front range and a back range oriented north to south. It is built of local rubble stone with ashlar dressings, with some use of brick. The windows are timber framed with transoms, and the roofs are of clay tile on most sections, though some areas have asbestos tiles. The malt floors are supported on cast iron columns.

The front elevation faces west and is of coursed rubble stone with ashlar quoins and dressings to windows and doors. It is divided into two blocks. The right-hand block contains five first-floor windows and four ground-floor windows, with a segmental headed yard entry flanked by double timber doors. To the right of centre is a segmental headed doorway with a moulded hood and stone quoins; the lintel bears the painted inscription 'WILLIAM FRANK MORGAN/Licensed Maltster' in mid-19th-century lettering. The left-hand block has four windows to ground and first floors and two doors with segmental headed lintels and moulded hoods. A low wall with an entrance to the rear links with No. 37.

The south elevation combines coursed rubble stone and brick with ashlar dressings to the no. 4 malt floor windows. It is divided into five blocks, the third containing the malt floor. The fourth block includes timber sliding doors above the ground floor and a further door with a hoist for lifting barley. The fifth block is a sweater kiln constructed in 1890 of brick with an asbestos tile roof and a timber door to the upper level. The east elevation shows the return side of the sweater kiln and a mid-20th-century storage range of lesser importance. The north or garden elevation includes the side elevation of the no. 1 malt floor with renewed timber windows emphasised by brick surrounds.

The interior clearly demonstrates the malting process. Accessed via the second door from the left, a late-19th-century entrance leads to a central hall with converted offices and museum on either side. The remainder is divided into two blocks of two, making four malt floors in total, separated by a central outside walkway. Each block contains a lower and upper malt floor divided by a central wall, with kilns at the west end and brick steeps at the east end. The sweater kiln in the south-east corner retains its perforated tile floor.

Wiltshire has long been known as a 'malting county' and is one of the few counties where traditional floor malt is still produced. Malting was of particular importance in Warminster: by the middle of the 18th century, the town's malting trade was said to be larger than that of any other town in the west of England and supplied Somerset and much of Bristol. In 1720 there were 36 malthouses in Warminster, though the trade began its decline in the early 19th century.

Pound Street Malthouse was owned by the firm Morgan/Beaven. Though reputed to be 18th-century in origin, it was substantially remodelled in 1879 under the direction of E. S. Beaven, nicknamed 'Barley Beaven'. Under his management it became an academy of barley breeding and malting until 1941. Beaven began working for W. F. Morgan at Pound Street in 1878 and was responsible for kiln developments and barley breeding, achievements for which he won numerous awards and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. His most notable barley variety, Plumage Archer, introduced to British farmers in 1905, became the mainstay of UK malting barley production for the next fifty years.

The malthouse retains Beaven's patented brick steeps and kilns, and remains a unique survival of a working floor maltings with exceptional preservation of its industrial fixtures, fittings, and process legibility.