What was here?
An old corn mill beside the River Cole, then in open country south of Birmingham. In the 1750s the Boultons used it as a ‘flatting mill’, rolling sheet metal for their buttons and toys. The present brick mill, rebuilt by the landowner a few years after they left, still stands.
History
Power from the country
Birmingham’s toy makers needed thin, even sheets of metal, and by the 18th century rolling it was mill work, driven by water. The town’s own streams were crowded with mills; the Victoria County History says demand for sites forced manufacturers to look further out, to the River Cole. The Boultons were among them.
Sarehole was already old. The Victoria County History traces a corn mill here to 1542, when it was known as Biddle’s Mill, and by 1727 it was called High Wheel Mill. In about 1756 (Grace’s Guide says 1755) the Boulton family business took the lease. Birmingham Museums Trust says Matthew Boulton used it from 1756 to 1761 as a “flatting mill”, producing sheet metal to make buttons.
It was an outpost, not a factory. “There was a rolling mill at Sarehole but Snow Hill was where most of the work took place,” writes Val Loggie. The rolled metal went back to the family workshops in town to be stamped, cut and finished.
A family affair
The mill was more than a business address. The Victoria County History says Matthew Boulton the elder spent the last years of his life at Sarehole, and his widow held the mill in 1760, the year after his death. For their son, though, it showed the limits of borrowed water. In 1761 he took over a mill at Soho, much closer to town, and from 1762 he built his own works there.
Rebuilt and saved
Once the Boultons had gone, its owner, Richard Eaves, rebuilt the mill. A new leat was cut in 1768, and an advertisement of 1773 described the mill as “lately taken down and new built”. Historic England’s list entry dates the rebuilding to about 1764–68; other accounts say 1771. Either way, the brick mill standing today is not quite the one Boulton knew.
The same spot, then and now
1888–1913
Today
Old map: Ordnance Survey six-inch, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (CC BY 4.0). Today: © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Later it ground blades as well as corn. In the 1850s it went back to corn, a steam engine was added, and machinery probably brought from Trittiford Mill was put in; much of it is still there. The young J. R. R. Tolkien grew up across the road. The mill was restored in the 1960s and is now run by Birmingham Museums Trust.
Boulton’s own building has gone, but the pond and the stream remain. Of all the places on his map, this is where you can still stand beside the water that once rolled metal for the Boultons’ buttons.
What happened here?
Leased by the Boulton family business from about 1756 and used as a flatting mill to roll sheet metal for buttons until about 1761. Matthew Boulton senior spent his last years at Sarehole. Rebuilt by Richard Eaves after the Boultons left; later a corn and blade mill, now a museum.
Why it mattered
Sarehole was the Boultons’ first source of water power. Its distance from town, and the small scale of what it could do, help explain why Boulton moved to Soho in 1761–62.
Why it disappeared
Other or unknown
The mill the Boultons leased was taken down and rebuilt by its owner, Richard Eaves, soon after they left. The rebuilt mill has survived.
What’s there now
What replaced it
The present mill, rebuilt by Richard Eaves in the late 1760s or early 1770s.
What survives
The rebuilt mill (Grade II), with its mill pond and much of its 19th-century machinery, including a cast-iron water wheel and a steam-engine chimney. Nothing of the building the Boultons leased is known to survive.
Today
Sarehole Mill stands at the corner of Cole Bank Road and Wake Green Road in Hall Green, in the Shire Country Park along the River Cole. It is a museum run by Birmingham Museums Trust, with displays on the mill and on Tolkien.
Sources and further reading
Start of the lease: 1755 (Grace’s Guide; Wikipedia, citing Pastscape) or by 1756 (Loggie, citing Dickinson; Birmingham Museums gives 1756–61). The Victoria County History links Sarehole to Boulton’s father, who lived there at the end of his life; other sources credit the son. Date of the present building: about 1764–68 (Historic England list entry), 1771 (Wikipedia and the Boulton research note), or before 1773, when it was advertised as “lately taken down and new built” (Victoria County History). That the Boultons converted the corn machinery for metal rolling is said by Wikipedia (“it is believed”) and is not used as fact.
- Sarehole Mill — Birmingham Museums Trust, Birmingham Museums Trust
- Economic and Social History: Mills, in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 7, pp. 253–269 — W. B. Stephens (ed.), Victoria County History, 1964. Sarehole Mill
- Sarehole Mill — National Heritage List for England entry 1075631 — Historic England
- Soho Depicted: prints, drawings and watercolours of Matthew Boulton, his manufactory and estate, 1760–1809 (PhD thesis) — V. A. Loggie, University of Birmingham, 2011. pp. 28–29 and 34 n. 128
- Matthew Boulton — Grace’s Guide
- Sarehole Mill — Wikipedia. lead only
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