Heath Mill (Cooper’s Mill), Deritend

History

The lords’ mill

Before steam, Birmingham ground its corn with water. One of the mills of the lords of Birmingham stood on the River Rea below Deritend Bridge, at the northern end of what is still Heath Mill Lane. It is first recorded in 1526, when it was leased to Gilbert Webb.

The lords wanted their tenants’ corn ground at their own mills. In 1525 an agreement allowed corn from the manors of Birmingham and Aston to be ground at either lord’s mill, and in the early 1540s the millers, the Sherwins, were caught up in a dispute over corn carried off to the mills at Saltley and Duddeston. In 1554 the Crown leased Heath Mill to Edward Lyttleton, and it passed through a string of tenants after him.

Cooper’s Mill

Soon after 1649 John Cooper took the lease. His family held it until the end of the eighteenth century, and the lane beside it appears as Cooper’s Mill Lane on the maps of 1751 and 1778.

The mill shaped the river. Its dam held the Rea up at Deritend, and in 1673 John Cooper was accused of raising the water so high that wagons could not use the ford beside Deritend Bridge. William Hutton thought that before the water “was pounded up to supply the mill” the river could be crossed on a few stepping stones, and that the dam “gave rise to a succession of paltry bridges”.

In 1728 William Cooper agreed to rebuild the mill within two years, and promised not to raise the water “to the damage of the Town Mill” upstream, the mill later used by the Lloyds for slitting iron. The Coopers had been scythesmiths. The mill was still grinding corn in 1756, and soon after that they may have turned it into a blade mill. Cooper’s Windmill, on the other side of the Rea, was probably worked with it.

From water to steam

The town was changing round the mill. From 1791 it made metal goods as well as flour, and a new pond was dug. In the 1790s the Warwick and Birmingham Canal was cut through the Little Park behind the mill, crossing its floodrace on an aqueduct.

In the early 1800s it was Woolley’s Mill, or Deritend Forge, worked by James Woolley, a sword cutler. By 1828 Thomas Whitmore was grinding corn there again, as Deritend Mills. By about 1841 the works ran on steam and no longer needed the pond. In 1851 the Corporation proposed carrying Fazeley Street across the pool to Heath Mill Lane, and the pool was built over. By the 1880s Walker’s wire, tube and rolling mills stood on the site.

The lane remembers

Nothing of the mill stands. The VCH thought its last remains probably went in the nineteenth-century river works. Birmingham’s Historic Environment Record lists the site, and the city’s conservation appraisal says remains of the mill and its water works may survive under the raised ground of the Rea valley.

The painter David Cox was born in a humble house in Heath Mill Lane on 29 April 1783, the son of a smith.

For more than three hundred years this mill decided how high the Rea stood at Deritend, and how hard it was to cross. The wheel and the pool have gone, but the lane that led to them still carries the mill’s name across every map of Digbeth.

Why it disappeared

Redevelopment

By about 1841 the works ran on steam and the pool was no longer needed. Fazeley Street was carried across it from 1851, and the old mill buildings were absorbed into factory premises, later Walker’s wire, tube and rolling mills. The VCH thought the remains of the water mill probably went in the nineteenth-century river works.