Our unusual industrial buildings correspondent felt compelled to investigate an intriguing building and he discovered it has a rich heritage.
As regular Curiosity contributor Dean Wilson will testify, the Wincolmlee area of Hull is full of weird and wonderful sights. Running parallel to the River Hull, it curves like a snake through the city’s historic industrial heartland and is lined with a variety of old brick buildings in varying states of disrepair. Near the tightest of one of those curves in the street is one property that is easy to miss.
Stood at a 90 degree angle to the pavement is what at first glance appears to be an old house dating from the Victorian era. Painted in fading cream, it boasts two prominent first floor bay windows and two distinctive chimney stacks on the modest-sized slate-covered roof. It’s clearly much older than an adjacent towering former brewery warehouse. A roller shutter covers what seems to be a doorway on the gable end facing the street and most of the windows are boarded up.
Intrigued, I headed into the office of a tyre-fitting business next door to ask the man behind the counter if he knew who owns it. He chewed on a pencil for a while before answering: “Don’t know.” I ask if he has any idea what it was last used for. After another lengthy chew, he replies: “I’ve been here 20 years and it’s always been like that. Empty.”
Sensing I wasn’t getting anywhere fast, I dipped into the archives to discover it’s the original office of seed crushing firm Willows Holt & Willows Ltd. which once operated a huge mill at the site. Built in 1875, the mill was the brainchild of industrialist John Green Willows who went on to become Lord Mayor of Hull a decade later. The office almost certainly dates from that time and its unusual position would have given those working inside a clear view of the main entrance yard at the mill.
At its peak, crushing seeds to extract oil for a variety of purposes was big business, involving numerous companies employing hundreds of people working in mills in the Wincolmlee area. The wealth generated for the owners of these firms was huge. When Willows Holt & Willows was merged with several others in Hull to create British Oil and Cake Company Ltd, John Bouch Willows – who inherited the business from his late father – became a director of the new mega firm.
When he retired, he was rich enough to buy Langdale Chase, a huge mansion set in six acres of gardens on the edge of Lake Windermere. It’s now a luxury hotel. Both father and son would have spent time in the company office where mill manager Francis Virtue was probably based. According to trade directories, Mr Virtue also lived next door at a time when the immediate neighbourhood looked very different. As well as his house, there was a nearby pub the Ferryboat Tavern which was later bombed during the Second World War.
Another snippet from the archives also shows Mr Virtue was busy coming up with new engineering ideas while based in his office. A listing in the January 23 edition of the London Gazette in 1877 says: “Francis Virtue of Hull, in the county of York, has given the like notice in respect of the invention of “improvements in machinery for measuring, compressing and moulding oil, seeds or other materials now commonly compressed wholly in hydraulic presses.” Backed with funding from Heritage England, a new project called Seeds of Change and led by Humber Field Archaeology has recently been launched to celebrate the area’s seed-crushing history. Hopefully, the old office will feature in that too.