Cloth Finishing Works At Tone Mills North Range Including Dyehouse And Reservoirs

Cloth Finishing Works at Tone Mills, North Range, including Dyehouse and Reservoirs

A textile finishing works and associated water management system built around 1830 with further additions and alterations throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Developed by Fox Brothers and Co of Tonedale Mills, Wellington, the complex was disused at the time of inspection in June 2000. The buildings are constructed of rubble stone and red brickwork with slated and glazed roof coverings.

The works developed on an irregular, accretional plan on either side of a bend in the River Tone, from which water for processing was drawn and treated in a reservoir to the west of the factory. The complex comprises a reservoir with sluice gates, a dyehouse, a finishing works with engine house and integral water wheel chamber, and two boiler houses.

The reservoir is a roughly triangular raised brick structure for storing water for treatment prior to use in cloth finishing. Metal sluice gates control water flow from the River Tone. To the east stands the finishing works, with a multi-ridge shed roof covering the central section and associated structures on its margins. A storeyed range to the north-west, believed to be a former dryhouse shown on a Tithe map of 1839, is partially of pier and panel construction. A single-storeyed late 19th-century engine house with two arch-headed windows on its south-west elevation adjoins the works, together with a two-storeyed ancillary building that housed a later electric motor and drive mechanism. The works incorporates a water wheel chamber with wheelpit and machinery from the earliest phase of development.

Further south stands the dyeworks, shown on the 1839 map and developed in three phases, reaching its fullest extent in the early 20th century. The northernmost section is two storeys high, built of rubble stone with red brick dressings and steeply pitched roofs. The wider gable features a clock face; the lower, narrower part displays a relocated 18th-century datestone and appears to have been an attached engine house. To the east is a tall single-storeyed structure with apex ventilation louvres, followed further south by a later north-light shed orientated north-west to south-east with a stone flanking wall. A stone-built north-light shed, attached to the south end of the finishing works engine house, may be the boiler house known to have been added in 1883–4. Further west, a rectangular boiler house adjoins the south wall of the reservoir. It is built of red brick with a triple-span slated roof, with two symmetrical roofs flanking an asymmetrical north-light ridge.

Internally, the finishing works is aligned north-east to south-west with sections defined by longitudinal timber beams supported by arcades of cast iron columns. These columns also support line shafting used to power two rows of in-situ fulling and tentering machines for cloth finishing. The roof supports further line shafting driven from the water wheel chamber located in the south-western part of the works, corresponding to the position of the wheel house shown on the 1839 map. The chamber contains an ashlar-lined wheelpit with breastwork, cast iron sluices, water flow mechanism, and the remains of a metal suspension wheel with ring gearing. An associated vertical drive shaft and belt drums occupy the south-west corner of the chamber. The engine house retains remains of decorative wall tile finishes and engine mountings. An ancillary room houses the main drive wheel, line shafting and clutch mechanism. The dye works features massive queen post roof trusses supporting an attic-level walkway. An inserted metal water tank sits at the west end with in-situ vats. The boiler house to the west employs lightweight metal construction comprising trussed principals and iron vertical and horizontal tie rods, with internal walls pierced by arched openings.

Tone Works was the dyeing and finishing works established by Fox Brothers and Co at the confluence of the River Tone and the Back Stream. The site is shown on the Tithe map of 1839, and the works was enlarged and altered over the next 80 years. In 1912 the site was described as having "perhaps the largest Indigo Dye House in England". Production continued until the 1990s.

Tone Works represents a near-complete example of a 19th-century cloth dyeing and finishing works, developed between around 1830 and around 1920. It retains all the component structures associated with the dyeing and finishing of worsted and woollen cloths, together with the machinery and fittings required for those processes. In its present form, Tone Works is an exceptional survival nationally, remarkable not only for the completeness of the building complex but also for the survival of its machinery, water management system and power generation plant.