Originally Posted by
phredd
Buchanans Flour Mill was on the Dock Rd.
Most of the building has gone now. ...
Yes, that's how I remember Dock Road between Poulton and Seacombe. Crossed by railway tracks in that area that lead to (substantially) disused goods stations on the North side.
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Flour milling sprang up along Mersey ports (first Ellesmere port, then Wallasey) in the wake of the 1846 repeal of the Corn laws (that basically had required corn to be milled near to where it was harvested). Since flour was more perishable than grain this deterred imports (and made British landowners powerful) until the corn Laws were repealed. A boom in imports from Canada and the US Great Lakes region soon followed.
The building of mills on the Mersey effectively put into terminal decline an 800 year tradition of corn milling at Chester weir. Indeed I can remember old people in the 1950s in Northwich using the expression "the rent of Dee Mills" to mean "an unreachable amount of money". Of course Dee Mills had not brought any rent money for at least 50 years even back then.
Like so many other things, the death of this industry was the containerisation revolution - it made it economic to ship flour rather than grain.
Now what was the name of the dog biscuit factory there?
All the substandard wheat was made into dog biscuits.
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