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For almost 200 years, the bell tolled to mark the start and end of the working day at one of the UK’s most remarkable industrial sites – but it vanished when the buildings became derelict in the late 1980s or early 90s.
As English Heritage prepares to welcome visitors to the Flaxmill Maltings building in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, a hunt for the missing bell has been launched.
Matt Thompson, the curatorial director of English Heritage, accepted it was possible the bell had been melted down and was lost forever. But he said: “It is more likely that someone took it as a souvenir which, at the time, looked close to ruin. Maybe it’s sitting in someone’s garden or in a shed.”
The bell and the building have long and important histories. Known as the grandparent of the skyscraper, the building was the world’s first multistorey, iron-frame building, with the design paving the way for modern high-rise buildings. Thompson said: “Without Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, today’s cities would look very different.”
The site opened in 1797 as a flax mill and then, from 1897 to 1987, was used as a maltings. It also served as a temporary army training unit and barracks during the second world war.
A third of the 800 workers at the flax mill were under 16 and some as young as nine. Shrewsbury itself was too small to provide that number, so children were brought in from as far afield as London and Hull, mostly from the workhouses. Often orphans, the children were given housing, food and clothes but not paid wages.
The missing bell would have called the children in from the apprentice house nearby. Days were long and conditions often brutal, with testimony from some former child labourers at the mill leading to the 1833 Factory Act, which restricted the hours that children could work each day.
Thompson said: “The urban migration, long, hard working hours and exploitation of children were catalysts for labour reform movements and legislation. It would be a fitting end to the story of Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings if we could find the bell and restore it to its rightful place, providing today’s visitors with an audible connection to the site’s history and past generations of workers.”
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Originally operated by a pull rope, the bell changed to an electric chiming mechanism after the second world war, but was lost at some point in the 1980s or 1990s when the building was left derelict after the closure of the business in 1987. Believed to be around 60cm (24in) high, the bell is cast with the year “1797” on it. The bellcote has been restored but remains, for the moment, empty.
Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings opens on Tuesday as English Heritage’s first new paid-for site in 21 years.
