It’s billed as the “grandparent of the modern skyscraper,” though it’s unlikely you’ve heard of it. From the outside, Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings resembles any number of red brick relics from the industrial revolution that litter the English north and Midlands.
But as the first building in the world to be built from a precast iron frame, this 18th-century mill is, according to its custodian, a “profoundly important” monument of world architecture — the forerunner of all iron- and steel-framed buildings, from 20th-century icons like the Empire State Building to 21st-century behemoths like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Now, this slab of English industrial heritage is ready for its close-up. This spring, English Heritage, the charity that manages Britain’s state-owned historic monuments, took ownership of the Shrewsbury site with a mission to highlight its past and future.
The factory may be a miracle of modern engineering, but its legacy is stained by the suffering of the workers, many of them children, who toiled there in harsh conditions. It now houses a museum dedicated to that history, but it is also being reborn as upscale offices for entrepreneurs. Soon, parts of the wider site will be converted into smart new housing.
The transformation is the latest in a push to find new uses for outsized relics of Britain’s industrial past, driven in part by heritage campaigners. “Heritage is often castles, thatched cottages, stately homes,” said Matt Thompson, English Heritage’s curatorial director. “Industrial heritage was for a long time overlooked because it’s not immediately responding to what we consider significant.”
When it was completed in 1797, the Shrewsbury mill was a factory for spinning and twisting the fibers from the stem of the flax plant into yarn and thread. It was later converted into maltings for beer production. In 1987, falling into disrepair, the site was awarded the highest level of protection to prevent it from being demolished. After two decades of neglect, it was bought in 2005 by Historic England, the British government’s executive heritage body, and restored following a 20-year, £28 million ($37 million) rescue operation.
To early 19th-century Britons, the mill would have been unimaginable as anything other than a place of relentless labor. When William Blake wrote of “dark, satanic” mills in “Jerusalem,” his epic allegorical poem about England’s spiritual state, he was referring to the dehumanizing work that powered them. The nation’s textile industry was the dynamic core of its booming economy, with many mills processing cotton harvested by enslaved people in Britain’s colonies (though Shrewsbury handled raw materials from Europe).
Up to 1,000 people worked and often lived in Shrewsbury Flaxmill, spinning on mighty mechanized looms powered by steam boilers that were fed a constant supply of coal. Records show that a third of its work force in 1860 was younger than 16. Some were as young as 10, including orphans who labored in exchange for food and lodgings.
The museum that now fills the space has raw flax to handle and Victorian child millworker costumes for children to play dress up. Soon, people will again live on the site that launched a thousand skylines, subject to planning consent. A foreboding brick outbuilding where child workers once slept will be repurposed as apartments. More new housing is planned around the mill’s perimeter, with prototypes designed by Peter Barber, one of Britain’s most public-spirited architects.
The main mill’s five floors are still supported by the original cast-iron skeleton, a forest of slender cruciform columns and thick beams that hold up the brick jack-arches of the roof. It was this revolutionary construction method that allowed subsequent super-talls to rise to hundreds of stories.
At the time, the industrialists behind the mill had no idea they were inventing the skyscraper, said Simon Cranmer, head of visitor experience, during a recent tour. They were simply trying to make it fireproof. “Mills were always catching fire, so the pressure was on to come up with a way of cutting that out,” Mr. Cranmer said.
There was also the problem of supporting heavy machinery. Charles Bage, part of a network of 18th-century progressive scientists and an ingenious land surveyor, was hired by the mill’s owners to solve the fire problem. Bage came up with an iron frame, engineered to support the ceiling and able to withstand extreme heat. The mill’s location was no accident: Shrewsbury is 15 miles from Ironbridge, the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the 18th- and 19th-century center of the cast-iron industry.
Thomas Leslie, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pointed out that Bage drew on earlier structural breakthroughs, including a cotton mill in Derbyshire, 80 miles to the northeast, with cast-iron columns and timber beams with wide flanges, an innovation that increased load-bearing capacity.
“It’s how Bage went about designing the beams that is the real innovation, and one that we still use,” Mr. Leslie said. “Today we use W-beams” — with wide flanges that do most of the support work — “and you can trace that directly to this little calculation that Bage does.”
Shrewsbury, he said, is “the first building you can point to and say, ‘Aha! They’re using cast-iron beams and columns together.’”
How much of that legacy can still be seen in today’s glittering skyscrapers? A little, said Bill Baker, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and the structural engineer behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.
“The Empire State Building is pretty similar to the mill — a bunch of columns sprinkled throughout the building,” Mr. Baker said. “Cast iron in Shrewsbury and steel in the Empire State. But by the 1950s and ’60s, a whole new generation started from scratch. They come up with new geometries, they move all the columns to the perimeter creating interior spaces that are largely column-free, and concrete comes into play.”
Said Mr. Leslie, “You might say it’s an intellectual heritage, as much as a physical heritage.”
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