Hartford End Mill (EHER 37124)

Watermill, built in the late 18th century, disused since 1929. Now a house.

Water Mill, Hartford End. House conversion. <1> Watermill, (Disused). <2> Mill (dis) [NAT]. <3> Watermill. Late 18th century. A two-storey brick and tiled building hoist loft, showing combined frontage with mill house. Disused since 1929 and only wooden vertical shaft survives. Mill now converted to house. Exterior sluice by Whitmore and Binyon, Wickham Market, 1881. <4> August 1984. Grade II* listed. Hartford End Mill. Watermill on River Chelmer. Late 18th century. Grade II*. (See list for details). <5> 2008. Field survey. The mill occupied by William Ridley in 1839 was bought for £3,125 by Thomas Dixon Ridley in 1876 from Henry Richard Charles and his son William Henry Wellesey. At this point it had a fall of 10ft 8in and ran four pairs of stones driven by a 25ft wheel and storage for 500 quarters. It worked until 1929 when the wheel was sold and the machinery was stripped out, leaving only the vertical wooden shaft. The up river sluice gear by Whitmore and Binyon dated 1881, has some attractive iron ornaments and a separate gate to feed the iron grill eel trap which remains (Benham, H). The mill was converted into a house in the 1970s for Nicholas Ridley, then the owner of Ridley and Sons Hartford End Brewery, conveniently sited at a short distance to the south-east of the mill. The Grade II* mill (this record) forms an important group of historic buildings with the Grade II mill house (EHER 37125) and the Grade II mill bridge (EHER 37126). In a wider context these buildings have group value with the undesignated but currently threatened mid 19th century industrial buildings of the former Hartford End Brewery. Thought to date from about 1780 Camsix mill is an impressive approximately 10 bay, 2½ storey brick built in-line mill and mill house with a plain tiled mansard roof, hipped to the south and gabled, probably re-profiled when the present lucam was added, to the north. The mill straddles the River Chelmer which is diverted toward the wheel pit sited in the southern bays. The main sluice to the overflow pool and leat lies to the west of the mill and on the southern bank. The mill house abuts the mill to the north. The windows are a mixture of timber built multi-paned casements and sashes which appear to have changed little since the listing re-survey of 1984. The majority have brick segmental arched heads although there are also larger flat headed windows and an ornamental arched headed window of late 18th-earlier 19th century date. The flat-headed dormer window in the northern bays is 20th century. The façade is built in red brick in Flemish bond and has a brick eaves band, pierced in three places by tie bars and plates. A sack hoist beam projects from the roofline just above the eaves and directly over an off-centre taking-in door at first floor. A gabled dormer, now removed, once lay between the hoist and the lucam. The large weather-boarded lucam is supported on curved arch braces and resides within the roof structure, above the eaves at the southern end of the mill. The roofline of the southern three to four bays, into which the lucam sits off-centre, was elevated above that of the adjoining roofline to the north. This suggests that the grain bins, as is common in many Mansard roofed mills, were incorporated into roof structure and above the stones on the floor below. The upright shaft, all gearing and stones were removed during the 1930-40s and now apart from the northernmost bays which were converted to residential use, the majority of the mill lies unused albeit for general household storage (pers comm.). The mill bridge in common with the mill is built in Flemish bond and is braced using a number of tie bars and plates. The northern round headed arch of the mill tail race appears to remain in fair condition although the larger southern arch is noticeably beginning to fail. The bridge was added to the Essex Historic Buildings at Risk Register in 2006 but to date no repairs have been made. Present Use: Part residential part storage. Condition: Good (mill and mill house). <6> Original HER entry merged with NRHE data transfer.