I had wanted to visit the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings ever since it was West Midlands Building of the Year two years ago.

It is indeed an enormously impressive structure, like something from the West Riding, but built in Ditherington just north of Shrewsbury because its Unitarian investors, Thomas and Benjamin Benyon, lived there. 

So, the first big industrial mill constructed with iron columns, was built in 1796 not in Yorkshire, but Shropshire, not far from Ironbridge:-