Building record GFD 021 - Glemsford Silk Mills

The redundant factory of ‘Glemsford Silk Mills Ltd., silk throwsters & dyers’, adjoins open countryside at the north-eastern edge of Glemsford village. The original mill was built in 1824 by Alexander Duff as part of the tax-induced movement of the silk industry to the region from the east end of London. Duff’s family business was based in Spital Square, and his new factory was designed to process raw silk into yarn by ‘throwsting’, i.e. by steeping, winding, doubling and twisting. Dyeing was added to these functions in 1958, but silk weaving has never taken place here. The tithe survey of 1841 describes the site as a ‘silk manufactory, house and garden’ owned and occupied by Duff in conjunction with nearby Hill Farm where he lived with his family. The dwelling house attached to the southern end of the
mill was occupied by its manager. The machinery was powered by a waterwheel supplied from a large headwater pond of more than half an acre beneath the modern car park, and the principal building was an imposing three-storied structure under the same roof as the surviving house but with an additional basement floor. This picturesque mill remained largely unaltered until 1960, and some of its machinery is preserved in museum collections including a beam engine of 1849 at Beamish and a wooden-framed throwsting machine in the Science Museum at South Kensington. By the mid-20th century the site was owned by Stephen Walters and Sons Ltd., silk weavers of nearby Sudbury, and was used to prepare yarn for the coronation robes of Queen Elizabeth II and the wedding dresses of Princess Anne and Lady Diana Spencer. The three-storied range was demolished in 1960 and replaced with the present dye house in the following year when the rest of the factory was extensively altered and extended. Of the Georgian structure only the manager’s house survives in its original form, albeit much modernised, along with parts of the lower walls of the dye house which were retained from the basement storey. The northern wall of a large single-storied shed also remains to the north-east, and a mid-19th century extension survives to the west of the house (latterly containing a staff canteen). A stream which flows in a 19th century culvert beneath the dye house floor probably represents the by-pass channel, but archaeological evidence of the wheel pit and of any medieval occupation on the site may be preserved beneath the present concrete. Given the extent of the alterations in 1960 the buildings no longer meet the English Heritage criteria for listing (S1)