Kingsland Mill

Image: Sales Particulars for the contents of Kingsland Linen Mill from a Shrewsbury newspaper advert 5 October 1827.

Image from: Shropshire Archives

After Bage left his partnership with the Benyons in 1815, he built a new smaller steam-powered factory to weave linen cloth at Kingsland in Shrewsbury. The mill was a single-storey structure and employed up to 70 workers. It was built of brick and may not have used the iron-framed construction which Bage applied at Ditherington and Castlefields. As it was a single storey building, an iron fire proof construction was not necessary to support upper floors. Bage tried to develop a power loom for weaving linen. He wrote to Strutt: “Being no longer a spinner, and having little else to do, I have been constructing a loom on a plan quite new, and am about to try it with four horse power. Linen has not been advantageously wove with by power looms, and having the weakness of other projectors, I flatter myself I shall succeed better.”  He did not succeed in producing a viable power loom.

Following Bage’s death in 1822, the factory was run by his widow, Ann, but the business went bankrupt in 1827. A local advertisement listed the contents for sale in the mill which included a four horse-power steam engine, a variety of power and hand-operated looms.   In 1829, Thomas Burr, a local entrepreneur, bought the building from Ann Bage. A London plumber by trade, he moved to Shrewsbury in 1813 and patented Burr’s Lead Squirting Press in 1820 which revolutionised the production of lead pipes. The Kingsland factory site was developed as a lead manufactory.