Industrial Buildings

The use of timber framing in the construction of industrial buildings was at one time a common feature in many parts of the country. Of these, undoubtedly the finest to survive are the windmills – post and smock – which still grace the countryside in eastern England and the South-East as well as the odd example in the Midlands. Of almost equal charm and more numerous are the timber-framed watermills which are still to be found on the many rivers over much of the same area. Also within the group are warehouses, storage sheds, makings, workshops used for local crafts (for instance, blacksmiths, wheel­wrights and the like) and even toll cottages.

To these buildings must be added the numerous timber-framed cottages used for the many cottage industries prior to the Industrial Revolution, particularly those relating to wool and weaving. These

cottages would have differed little from other houses, although in many cases a workroom would have been provided. Former weavers’ cottages can be seen in many parts of the East in such places as Lavenham (the weavers’ cottages, Water Street) and Kersey. The most interesting of these buildings is undoubtedly Southfields, Dedham, Essex (193), said to have been originally a ‘bay and say’ factory. Built by a rich clothier in about 1500, it comprised living-quarters, workrooms or offices and a warehouse around a courtyard. The layout is not now clear but the south-west wing was called the master weaver’s house, while the upper floor of the east wing was one long room.

Windmills

The origin of the windmill in this country is now lost in history; whether they were an imported idea or the product of natural develop­ment is no longer certain. It is known that no windmills are recorded in the Domesday Book for the mills referred to in that document were either water – or horse-mills, with the first authentic reference being from 1185, when a windmill was let in the village of Weedley, York­shire. The earliest illustrations of windmills are those of the postmill in the English Windmill Psalter written in about 1260 and on the memorial brass in St Margaret’s Church, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, which commemorates a mayor of the town who died in 1348. The appearance of these and the representation of other postmills that have survived differ little from the mills of centuries later.

Postmills were the earliest of all the types of windmills deriving their name from the great post on which the body containing the machinery turns to face the wind. They were a feature of the fairly flat corn – growing counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge­shire, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and the east Midlands as well as in the Lancashire Fylde. Postmills probably reached their zenith in the eighteenth century with the construction of those in east Suffolk described by Rex Wailes as ‘the finest of their type in the world’. Of these, the finest one surviving and still in working order, is at Saxtead Green, built at the end of the eighteenth century and now owned by the Department of the Environment. The earliest surviving postmill dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century: Bourn Mill, Cambridgeshire, is generally regarded as the oldest, but that at Great Gransden in the same county may well be older. The mill at Pitstone, Buckinghamshire (194) is the oldest dated example – 1629 on a side girth, while the postmill at Outwood, Surrey, is the oldest working example, built in 1666. Working examples are to be found at Nutley, Sussex, which has been restored to full working order by the Uckfield and District Preservation Society, Wrawby, Humberside, the sole surviving postmill in Lincolnshire and Humberside, and Danzey Green