Old industrial hoover, in malt kiln derelict, abm in Louth. Rusty and unloved scrap. Died on the job
Almost since it went up, the malt kiln has always been seen a blot on the landscape but during the war, maltings production had been halved and people wanted it back to normal. Owners Gilstrap Earp, part of Associated British Maltsters hired contractor Mitchells of Grimsby to build the American design, a maltings like none seen in Europe before let alone Louth. But following the American architect's design, Mitchells and the men they employed did a good job. "It is very well built. I have seen similar maltings built in the sixties where they have got a bit sloppy but here there was great attention to detail and getting everything right,"John said. It took two years to finish the operation but it would have been quicker without post-war cement rationing. They built the skyscraping 120ft high barley and malt store then says, John, there was an interruption until limited supplies could be squared with the operation's huge appetite for cement. As they neared completion of the tower, fire and ambulance crews had to rescue a workman who fell from scaffolding onto the roof. They strapped him to a stretcher and lowered him vertically on ropes down the inside of the building. The interior was an extraordinary honeycomb of 96 eight foot square, 90ft high storage chambers for barley and malt. "That's why you couldn't demolish it by blasting. It is so strong it would fall like a huge box," John said. The lower long production section was finished for malting to start in 1952. The finished building was substantially bigger than Gilstrap Earp had originally envisaged, due to a transatlantic misunderstanding. American and British ideas of the trade measure for malt, "a quarter", are different. The American designer worked on the figures he was used to which he gave the firm so much extra capacity that it was able to increase production from 9385 tonnes in 1953 to nearly 14000 in 1960 without adding to the building. Some of the men who built the maltings
Size: 5025px × 3350px
Location: Louth, Lincolnshire, England
Photo credit: © Tommy (Louth) / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: dead, derelict, died, grubby, hdr, hoover, industrial, kiln, lincolnshire, louth, malt, mucky, rusty, tonemapped, unloved
