With thanks to Runner and Chauffeur … enjoyed this place immensely. Shot on Astia using the beast, and rounded off with breakfast at a proper greasy spoon.
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“Welcome to the New Hull”, says a giant 48-sheet billboard in the railway station: yet the making of the new city means picking apart the old one. Development is gutting the industrial district which lines the banks of the River Hull, upstream of its confluence with the Humber. Clarence Mills, right beside the Drypool Bridge, tells the story of the city’s rise and progress better than any ad campaign – because the men who built it are the men who made the original Hull. Clarence Mills was the work of Joseph Rank, who founded the Rank empire, and Alfred Gelder, Hull’s city architect and its mayor three times over.
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A gleam of light appeared on the horizon as we made our introductions, crossed the wilderness of the mill yard, then up many flights of steel stairs until we were on the silo roof, watching a livid sun rising over Spurn Head. From our overlook, you get a panoramic view of the city: of the Arctic Corsair, beached in the mud; the winding hole opposite where barges were swung about; upriver, the gaunt form of British Extracting; Drypool Bridge’s massive counterweight and bascule in our shadow; and looking southwards, the shark’s fin of The Deep, and the space age goalpost of the Tidal Barrage. The scene was tranquil at 5am, with both dossers and posties tucked into bed, and the wider city still asleep.
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Clarence Mills tell Kingston-on-Hull’s story: both grew up on the river, which acts as an artery for trade, and on which the city’s wealth was founded. Joseph Rank began his business with a windmill on the Holderness Road – when demand outstripped capacity, he took a share in the Holderness Corn Mill. Yet ambition pushed him further: he had seen a “roller mill” at Tadcaster, a recent innovation which used iron rollers to remove the wheat germ from the husk, rather than spinning sandstone discs. In 1885 Rank bought roller machinery from Henry Simon of Manchester, who pioneered its use in Britain, and installed it in his new Alexandra Mill. A few years later, he borrowed £14,000, bought another site on the bank of the River Hull, and commissioned the last word in milling technology from Simon: Clarence Mills was Joseph Rank’s largest enterprise to date, and became his flagship. The mill was on one side of Great Union Street (where Shotwell’s tower is now), with its silos opposite, on the site of the current mill.
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From the rooftop, we moved into the headhouse above the silos: a fiery sun glowed through the circular windows, cutting into the gloom that pervades lines of Redler conveyors. This was where wheat entered the mill once sucked from the holds of barges using the mill’s pneumatic “loose leg”. The elevator could raise one ton of wheat per minute, and from there it was funnelled into the grain bins, which sit on piles driven deep into the alluvial mud. The silos are the oldest remaining part of the mill, for reasons that will soon become apparent. After the silo, we moved into the body of the mill itself… The scale of these spaces approaches those inside Millennium Mills: and the interior of Clarence Mills gives you a good idea what the London building must have looked like two decades ago. The milling floors have a luminous quality – the liquid light of the river is softened by the flour dust, plus the pastel colours of the equipment – and the rising sun glowed on the screens and riddles which sifted the grain.
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