Ditherington Flax Mill, Historic factory in Shrewsbury, England
Ditherington Flax Mill is a former spinning factory in Shrewsbury built from red brick and standing five stories tall. Long bands of windows run across the entire facade and let light into the rooms while iron columns and beams remain visible inside.
Charles Bage designed the building in 1797 for linen producer John Marshall and used iron parts from William Hazledine's nearby foundry. The factory produced yarn from flax until its closure in the second half of the 19th century.
The site is known as the birthplace of modern building because iron replaced load-bearing walls here for the first time. Visitors can see the columns and beams that were copied in cities worldwide decades later.
An exhibition area on the ground floor shows the history of the building and explains the technical development of iron construction. The site sits on the edge of the town center and can be reached on foot from the city core.
The iron skeleton was designed to resist fire after many factories burned down in that era because of flaming wooden beams. Bage calculated the load capacity of each beam by hand because there were no standards for metal construction at the time.
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