Visited with Kona
Have a report. It's inaccurate and confusing, but then, so was this place.
The building is split into two mills, one apparently for grain storage and a second for flour making. I’m guessing here, but there was lots of spilt grain in the first, and lots of flour in the second, so I’m going on evidence. The big white bit with the portholes and the ‘Byker Romeo’ graffiti is the grain storage bit.
Pics. As you would expect, there were hoppers. I suspect there’s more inside the bulk of this building as on each level there were rooms of machinery which obviously weren’t anywhere close to filling the sheer volume of the building, but we couldn’t find a way in to the rest. The top floor and the roof were definitely the best.
Once I’d recovered from the serious jelly legs brought on by the roof we had a look at the little bridge as a means of access to the second building, but it looks like it’s held together with woodworm, rust and layers of paint, so we passed on that for an alternative route.
The Flour Mill (for want of a better or more accurate name) is just something else. It’s like Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but cheesier-smelling (a by product of the mouldering plies of grain everywhere). There are pipes, and hoppers, and chutes, and machines for grinding, and mixing, and... stuff. I have no idea what any of it is for. As far as I can tell, grain goes in the top floor (although goodness knows how, since I think it’s all in the other building), through a something which goes down a pipe, which connects to some other pipes in a random and interchangeable order (interchangeable by means of gaffer tape) which go into an grinding oojit, followed by a agitating thingummybob and eventually, at the bottom, out comes a small, fat mouse, which falls twenty feet into a huge silo. At some stage in the process, flour is produced.
Grain in:
Hopper tops:
Forest of pipes:
Grinders?
Oojits:
Wossnames:
Silo tops:
Inside the silos. It was quite a long way down:
‘Arty’ Shots
For dial fans:
There was some silliness in the basement, too.
Anyway, it was brilliant and wonderful and very, very woo. Go now.