Welcome to Fletcher's Paper Mill, often regarded as one of the UK's best urbex spots in recent years. Of course, that is subjective. It's also past tense unless you can time travel, because shortly after my visit it was completely demolished.
This external photo is from the 1930s so obviously I didn't take it. It probably doesn't look too different though. The chimney was torn down at some point before the 1950s but that's probably the most noticeable change.
Apologies for not having my own external shots. My time outside of the premises was mostly spent being escorted off site by an admittedly lovely security guard who informed me that the derelict mill is sometimes used to train police dogs. He even told me that some plucky urban explorer got chomped by one not so long ago.
Eep!
But no matter! Security only nabbed us on the way out! Prior to that, we had a several-hour scurry around this amazing place, free of interruption, dog or otherwise. And I have to say, it was pretty damn magnificent.
Let's slip inside!
In its heyday, Fletcher's produced around 85% of Britain's cigarette paper, so it's not very surprising that this place is absolutely huge. And this wasn't even their only factory! They had an older one that is long demolished. While I've seen reports that both these mills produced paper for books and magazines, apparently this place primarily made cigarette paper, while the other factory was primarily best known for one product- toilet paper and bibles.
In regards to this mill, we're starting the adventure at what seems to be the finishing area. This was the final stop on the cigarette papers journey from pulp to cancer stick, where it was cut to its desired size and rolled onto big spooling machines.
Allegedly this is the part that security liked to occasionally saunter through too, so we were a bit wary.
When I began researching the paper mill, I started with various urbex posts, expecting to do what I always end up doing, which is call out bad research, disprove lies, and hurt feelings. But much to my surprise this paper mill has been covered pretty accurately by those who had come before me. It's like Christmas for me!
This place was originally a cotton mill established in the 1780s by a chap called James Bottomley. Some sources give the year 1794 as a date for the mills construction, and urbex reports also mention a huge flood that wiped out most of the buildings in 1799, but I've not been able to verify that.
I'm pretty sure James Bottomley was born in 1786, but it's a surprisingly common name, and there was actually a multitude of James Bottomleys working in the cotton industry back then, what with it being so prosperous. Unfortunately record keeping in the 1780s wasn't exactly as sophisticated as it is today either, so things are a bit murky to say the least.
But hey-ho.
I don't know what these machines did, but I absolutely love the carpet of moss that surrounds them.
This contraption allegedly helped put the finished paper onto a roll, ready to be shipped out. One of the rolling cylinders has loads of plastic pink things wrapped around it, the purpose of which escapes me. It also has a protective screen between the rollers and a control panel.
James Bottomley had two sons. Bramley was born in 1817, and Edward was born in 1824. Hiking enthusiasts in Lancashire may be familiar with "Bramley's Cot," an old ruin on a hill near a popular walking trail. This was allegedly Bramley's shepherd hut or a hunting lodge. Someone has even speculated that it was his explosives store room, although why a cotton manufacturer would store explosives in a tiny stone shack on a hill is anyone's guess. I suppose everyone needs a hobby.
Some people do ponder if Bramley's Cot had anything to do with Bramley at all, but it is labelled Bramley's Cot even on maps from 1888, so I'm guessing... yes?
Bramley and Edward would grow up to run the cotton mill, with employment numbering in the hundreds. Bramley even had several houses built specifically for the mills employees. That's pretty cool of him. He married a woman named Sarah Buckley, and had three daughters, Maria in 1851, Mary in 1860 and Edith in 1863. And if you think naming two sisters Maria and Mary is a tad unimaginative, wait until we get to the Fletchers!
Edith was apparently an artist. She sold a painting titled "la mille d'un pecheur" for £30 in 1892. According to the Bank of England, that's about £3000 today, which means it must have been one hell of a painting! Unfortunately I can't find an image of it. It's entirely possible that it no longer exists, but I like to think it's hanging in some descendants house somewhere.
This is so cool. One day the factory employees parked up these fork lifts at the end of their shift, and they never moved again. I've found quite a varied mix of abandoned vehicles over the years, from cruise ships to spacecraft, but this is the first time I've come across fork lifts.
Sarah Bottomley died in 1883 followed by Bramley in 1884. It seems that after this there was some legal kerfuffle between his daughters and his brother Edward. He left his daughters all of his money, and Edward was a bit miffed because he needed it in order to keep the family cotton empire afloat.
Seeing as the mill's machinery was sold in the late 1880s, followed by the mill itself, I'm guessing things didn't go too well.
Edward passed away in Southport in 1889, at which point a chap called Squire Stead was said to have the mill. That's really not as common a name as you'd think, and I didn't really dive too deeply into his history after I encountered five of them in the area around the same time. He only had the mill for a short time anyway. There was a fire in 1890, which the media reported on, claiming that a woman had seen some boys fiddling with matches. The woman's husband wrote in, demanding a re-write. Apparently she had never seen the boys playing with matches. She actually saw the boys running from the mill while smoke was rising from it. Admittedly, it's still a bit suspicious but apparently little details matter to these two.
There were a few more incidents around this time. A former employee who was working late, Samuel Clarke, lost his wife Sarah when she brought his dinner to the mill and then fell in the river and drowned while walking home. She was only 32. That sounds incredibly awful for them. Imagine casually eating your dinner, remarking on how great your wife is for bringing it to your workplace, not knowing that at that exact moment she's in mortal peril and you'll never see her again.
There was another incident in 1897 where a young man lost his fingers in a machine. His last name was Sharpe, and all the jokes pretty much write themselves, which is fortuitous, because he wasn't writing anything.
By 1900 the mill was described in the media as "old and disused," but it was put back to use by an unnamed gentleman for the purpose of cutting velvet. And I guess it was a stressful environment, because in 1907 an employee named Titus Leach was charged with assaulting his co-workers.
Live the dream, bro.
Beyond this contraption, we can see a set of windows. That was the staff break room, and it was pretty cool. We'll head there next!
Years ago this area would have been full of life, with staff eating their lunch, bantering or having a good bitch about everything before going down to the factory floor. There are two levels to this break room, too!
I guess this was where the cool kids sat.
And here's the view of the factory from the canteen.
On the wall are a few notices. The fire evacuation one is fairly straightforward, although I did have to laugh at the line near the bottom. "Do not shout or run. This tends to cause panic." You just know this line was added because some factory employee once lost his mind and ran around screaming, and it turned out that it was just the toast burning or something.
The chlorine procedure is pretty interesting. Chlorine was often used to bleach the wood pulp to give the paper its whiteness. Nowadays I think there is a bit of a shift from using chlorine in paper production, and the environmental hazard is one of the reasons why. Allegedly this factory had a siren to warn the public and everything.
And check out the food menu dated 1997. Pizzas for £1??? Pudding of the day for 65p???
The nineties really were where we peaked as a species. It was all downhill from there.
Leading off from the cafeteria are the staff toilets, and I absolutely love these mirror stools.
Here are some old incinerators for sanitary products. I don't think they make these anymore. They're fairly archaic.
So back in the Victorian era, while people were losing fingers and Titus Leach was punching his idiot co-workers all to a backdrop of family inheritance drama, some distance away was a paper factory owned by Ralph Crompton and his nephews, Roger and James Crompton. They'd allegedly set up their paper factory in 1829, although there is some evidence to suggest that Ralph inherited it from another chap in 1821.
Whatever the truth, it was a different factory to this one so its relevance is really just that they employed a chap named Robert Fletcher.
Robert Fletcher was apparently born in 1806, and he came from humble beginnings. He married a woman named Tabitha in 1830 and then got himself a job at the Crompton's paper factory so that he could provide for his family-to-be. He was very hard working, and this didn't go unnoticed by his papery overlords, so he soon rose through the ranks of the factory, ascending to the manager of the bleaching department before running the entire mill. He was also spawning his own successors in the form of his two sons, James and John, born in 1833 and 1840.
And because I love old photos, here's Robert Fletcher.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Ralph Crompton passed away in 1826, and his nephew James passed away in 1831. Articles from 1856, referring to a fire at the paper factory, make mention of it belonging to Roger Crompton, but the 1851 census lists Robert Fletcher as the manager.
I can't find an exact date for Roger Crompton's death but I did find an article from 1862 that made mention of Robert Fletcher being included in his will, so I suspect it was around then.
Without any existing Cromptons, Robert Fletcher found himself running the entire paper business. His own brother James worked there too, as well as his two sons, John and Another James. This James also had two sons, John Robert in 1855 and another James (James III?) in 1857.
The Crompton's paper mill was still very much a family business, but it wasn't the Crompton's family anymore. And so Robert Fletcher decided that the entire operation needed just one small alteration: It should be named after him.
Thankfully they were better at making paper than they were at thinking up original names for their children.
Robert Fletcher died on the 17th May 1865, whereupon his brother took over the company. I can't actually find much on him, except that he died in 1877 at the age of 63, and that he was manager of the paper mill until then.
The paper mill was then taken over by Robert's son, the other James, who I have a photo of.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Kinda reminds me of Fraiser.
Because the Fletcher's are comically shite at coming up with original names, I have trouble attributing various articles to precise James Fletchers. I've found articles about James Fletcher having his watch stolen in 1861, with a man named Joseph Douglas being charged for theft after he ran around every pub in Manchester trying to sell it. I also found a story of James Fletcher having his prize cock (male chicken, not his doodah) stolen from a chicken pen in 1872. The chicken thief was named George Tonge, and he justified his erratic behaviour by saying that he'd gotten a bit drunk after arguing with his wife.
Interestingly enough, the Fletcher's had employed a woman named Sarah Tonge, and in 1860 she had threatened to drown herself and her newborn baby if her husband didn't treat her better. This led to her father-in-law confiscating the baby, and Sarah Tonge being beaten by him when she tried to get the baby back. I wonder if this woman is the wife of George Tonge the chicken thief.
But unfortunately, with a number of James Fletcher's to choose from, it's not easy to determine which James is referred to in these articles.
I'll throw in a picture of James's son, James III, too just for the sake of completion. Although given that he was born in 1857, I doubt any of these stories were about him.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Naturally, the first Fletcher's paper factory wasn't without incidents and even though it isn't the factory I'm documenting today, some of them still stood out enough for me to want to comment. One of their wagon drivers, James Robinson, died in 1872 after he fell from his wagon and the wheel went right over his chest, crushing his ribs. The media reported that he then endured thirteen hours of agony before finally dying.
The most notorious incident, covered by pretty much every media outlet at the time, was of a boiler explosion at the factory in 1879. Most of the boiler was flung thirty feet into a house, which it (predictably) destroyed. Some additional boiler parts were found in a field 300 yards away. But of course, it was the impact on the employees that made this catastrophic. 33-year-old Edward Edwardson was standing right next to the boiler when it happened. He was retrieved from the rubble of the building, suffering from burns and fractures. He died a few hours later. Another employee, 38-year-old William Jackson, was described as being "of doubtful recovery," but he survived. Other employees, 63-year-old James Isherwood, his brother 54-year-old John Isherwood, 23-year-old William Barlow and 25-year-old Robert Wilson all suffered burns, cuts and fractures but were otherwise okay.
After the explosion a few of the Fletcher employees were out of work. To his credit, James Fletcher re-deployed them to other parts of the factory, but a few of them grumbled about this for some reason. Six of them decided to go on strike. It lasted about a day until they decided that there really wasn't anything to strike about. Their place of employment had blown up, and their employer was offering them paid work in another part of the factory. What more did they want?
They came to see James Fletcher the following day, and told him that they had changed their mind. James Fletcher told them to fuck off, since they'd behaved in such an ungrateful manner. And I do kinda see his point. Unfortunately one of the men, Robert Hallam, must have been struggling already, because he killed himself. His wife came downstairs in the morning and found him hanging in the kitchen. It's not known what James Fletcher thought of this, but I imagine there would be some sense of guilt, even if his own actions were completely justified.
James Fletcher died in 1887, with his obituary talking fondly of the quality of his paper and his love of dog breeding. His widow, Charlotte Fletcher, went to live the rest of her years with her sister. I have a photo of her too!
(Photo not mine, obviously)
With James dead, the paper factory went to his brother, John. Unfortunately John was murdered in 1889, another story that had wide media coverage.
John had met a young man, named Charles Parton, while out drinking. They'd got a cab together, but shortly after commencing on their journey, someone ran over and told the cab driver that his carriage door was hanging open. The driver investigated and found John unconscious, and Charles Parton nowhere to be seen. John died on the way to hospital, with the conclusion that he had been drugged and robbed.
Charles Parton was fairly easy to catch. He'd taken John's stolen possessions to a nearby pub, and he was identified as having robbed chloral from a chemists a few days earlier. Being such a sloppy criminal, his only defence was that he had only meant to sedate John and didn't do it very well because he was uneducated. This didn't go down very well in court, and he was sentenced to death. He was only eighteen.
James Fletcher's sons, John Robert and James III, were running the paper factory as of 1895, with James being incredibly prominent in the local council. They employed between two hundred and three hundred people, but kept management in the family. Their sister Elizabeth was also involved, as was John Robert's wife, Ellen, and a chap named Howard Grimshaw, the brother of James Fletcher's wife Emily.
I have a photo of Emily too. She's the one in the dress.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
John Robert died in 1907. His health had already been failing, and he'd gone to Buxton to recuperate. He died while he was there so that really backfired. The entire paper factory closed for his funeral, with many of his employees attending. His brother James was there, along with their sister Mary Jane, and her husband Richard. Richard's surname was also Fletcher, so I'm guessing he was a cousin or something. Also there were Richard and Mary Jane's children, Herman, Kathleen and Marian.
And I have photos of all of them. They have nothing much to do with the Fletcher's paper factory but they no doubt lived a life of relative wealth because of its success, and I'm going to include them anyway because I like old photos.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Richard, husband of Mary Ann Fletcher.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Mary Ann Fletcher, sister of James and John Robert Fletcher.
Kathleen Fletcher
Herman Fletcher. From what I can tell, he was in the pipeline to takeover the paper factory someday, but he died in the first world war.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Marian Fletcher
(Photo not mine, obviously)
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Incidentally, the first world war is what led to the Fletcher company acquiring this factory, but I'm not sure how many of those pictured ever actually set foot in it.
Let's check out the offices!
But he's got a games machine, which is pretty cool. I can't help but feel sorry for him though. It says "2002" on it, which means it was brand new when the factory closed. It can't have had much use, and probably still works.
There's loads of those pink plastic things all over the floor here. I still have no idea what they are!
Onto the bleaching area!
Near the finishing room are a series of offices that have been looted pretty heavily. I guess those local kids really wanted a new stapler. Despite the carnage, it's remarkable how much has been left behind.
This office has some contraption in front of it. I have no idea what this does.
Check it out! These old box monitors make this office an early noughties time capsule.
And not far away we have a store room.
It's quite interesting to see all these stacks of paper, over a decade old. The factory made all this, placed it in here ready to be shipped out, and then forgot about it.
Let's slip upstairs!
Upstairs we have even more offices. But we also have something even better! The infirmary!
How cool is this? Back in the day, anyone who was injured at the factory would be taken here for some immediate first aid. And it's all just left as it was.
Through my research, I found only one historic mention of the infirmary, and that was in June 1987. A woman named Susan injured her foot. After coming up here to the infirmary, it was decided that this was a matter for the real hospital, and an ambulance was called. The factory said that the matter was under investigation.
I hope she was okay.
During the first world war, this factory was briefly occupied by the military to make guncotton, which was a bit more efficient than gunpowder in combat, but a smidge more unstable, and it comes as no surprise that there were at least two wartime fires here.
Some of the former factory workers would fight and die in the war. One of these was 22-year-old William Robinson, one of many soldiers who had their mug shot posted in the local rag, although the scan I found wasn't brilliant.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
I always get a bit sad when I see photos of people who died in the first world war, especially when they're so young. The first world war was an absolute massacre, and it's such a shame that boys who had their whole lives ahead of them were just sent off to die.
On a more amusing note, another former employee named Gideon Mellor got completely drunk one night and seemingly decided that he could still come to work, despite the fact that the military had his workplace now. When confronted, Gideon just got gobby, and he ended up in jail for a month. I guess that's probably the best outcome of leading a drunken one-man attack on the military.
But it was the first world war that led to this old cotton mill being snatched up by the Fletcher paper company.
In 1915, cigarette paper was a bit of a French monopoly, and Imperial Tobacco were a bit miffed that hostilities had hindered their means to give people cancer. They were looking for a British supplier and Fletcher's were quick to take the opportunity. Soon after the war, they snapped up this mill. Cigarette paper production commenced in 1921.
Sadly, James Fletcher was not there to see it, having died in 1915. Of all the obituaries in the Fletcher dynasty, his is the most curious, claiming that he did a lot of philanthropic work that the public was largely unaware of. He was apparently a good employer, and the numerous staff trips are testament to this. Often James Fletcher just closed the mill for the day and let the workers have days off to Blackpool, with the train tickets paid for by the company. It sounds pretty sweet. He also owned a lot of property that he rented to his employees.
His money was left to his two daughters, Elspeth and Dorothy. I'm not sure how much these two had to do with the original paper factory, or this factory, but there's a pretty cool photo of Dorothy on a boat that I'm going to share anyway.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
I've also managed to find a scan of her dog license, which is pretty cool.
So for anyone who doesn't know, dog licenses were introduced in 1878, and you could be fined for not having one if you owned a dog. Kinda like a TV license.
And just like a TV license, the law was ignored by more than half of the people that it applied to, and it cost more money to enforce than it actually made from the licenses.
Unlike the TV license, someone at the top realised that it was an exercise in futility and axed dog licensing in 1987.
Allegedly Dorothy's dog license was found in the basement of the original Fletcher factory before it was demolished, which certainly does imply that she had some involvement in the company.
The offices still have loads of paperwork left behind, although it seems to mainly be policies and all that other stuff that no employee ever actually reads.
Once paper manufacturing commenced, this factory employed hundreds of people. Some sources even say it had a thousand employees at one point, although I'm not sure how true that is.
The factory opened up its nearby social club in 1937. A beloved foreman and one of the mills first employees, John William Mills, started running a keep-fit class there, which he managed until his retirement in 1953.
The factory also had their own tennis courts and football pitch on site. There's also a photo of the Fletcher factory having a float at a parade.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
It's interesting that they're primarily advertising that they make tissue paper, despite all my other sources focusing on the fact that they primarily made cigarette paper. Perhaps tissue paper is what they were best known for at some point, before the cigarette thing really took off. The staff are all dressed as archers, which was the company symbol. There are archers on some of their documents, and most of their recruitment adverts would also depict the archer. I'm not sure how that became the logo, or what it has to do with paper, but Frosties have nothing to do with tigers either. This sort of thing doesn't have to make sense.
Here's the company bowling club from 1948:
(Photo not mine, obviously)
There was also a dairy farm on the land, and Fletcher's employed someone to run it, presumably with the goal of providing resources for the factory. A job advert from 1942 pitched the job role with the perk "Home with electric light available." I guess that was the 1940s equivalent of staying somewhere with free WiFi.
Here's a teapot still wrapped in a knitted tea cosy.
This office seems to be the place where every urbexer came to mark their territory. That cabinet is covered in peoples youtube channel titles and Instagram handles, and I've censored them all because I'm a massive bastard.
I have no idea what this doohickey is.
There were a couple of events in the 1940s that were pretty significant to the factory. Firstly in 1947 there was a drought that caused the nearby reservoir to drop 70 feet. Water is a prominent part of paper production, and the mill ran on about 30,000 gallons a day, so when the reservoir dropped below the conduit to the factory, the fire brigade actually came out to help. I guess the fire chief was a smoker. They started pumping water night and day to keep the mill going, but there was only so much water left, and eventually the mill put out a notice that they would have to close unless there was rainfall in the next few days.
I'm not entirely sure how that saga concluded. Any closure would have been temporary, obviously.
In 1949 a plane from Belfast crashed about a mile from the mill, having been unable to see a hill because of the fog. The sound of the engine exploding alerted the paper mill employees, and about thirty of them set out on foot up the unpleasant terrain to see what help they could provide.
There were about 32 people on the plane, six of which were children. Three of those children were infants. Most of the passengers were already dead, but the paper mill employees managed to pull a few survivors from the wreckage and help them down the hill to the ambulances. One of the paper mill employees, a chap named William Heywood, boarded the wreckage and retrieved a small child who was estimated to be about three years old. There was a couple of survivors, Ruth and Horace Evans, who had lost a child in the crash. The three-year-old was brought to them in the hope that it was their missing child, but it wasn't.
And really, I can't help but feel terrible for that child. Not only was he orphaned but he probably only had a vague understanding of his life prior to the crash. His age was estimated by those who found him. He probably didn't know his date of birth or even his parents names. I just can't imagine growing up with so much mystery. I wonder what happened to him.
But to find the positive in such a gruesome situation, 32 people were on that plane, and those that survived did so because of the heroic action of the staff in this paper factory. That's pretty incredible.
The 1960s saw an absolute tidal wave of job adverts in the papers, which would indicate that either a lot of employees died, got sacked, or the company was growing. In 1966 they were actually mentioned on the TV show, Twenty Four Hours by Cliff Michelmore, because they had advertised for a job titled "Paper Scientist." This was exactly the sort of thing a TV personality couldn't take seriously, and Cliff urged the public to make little scientists out of paper and send them in.
Alas, this didn't happen. At least, according to the staff at Fletchers.
The tobacco paper industry went from strength to strength, with the managing director telling the press that they were 30% faster than the American paper factories, because they used simpler methods and had better craftsmen. And probably because the staff were thinner, let's be honest.
In this office we have a floor plan of the entire factory.
Check this out! A whole book full of peoples names and details, and a photo of some children dated 1968. It's crazy to think that these were possibly the children of someone who had an office here in the 1960s, and their photo is still here even though these children have now grown up.
In this office I found even more photos.
These are so cool! Evidently Fletchers often had events for their employees children.
It's a shame that these are here, because these children will have grown up, and these are probably fond memories for them. In fact these kids might now have grandkids. I feel like the photos belong with the relevant families.
This appears to be some sort of advertisement for toilet paper. It's pretty cool.
Check out these files! I love the decay in this place, because it is purely natural. These shelves are arranged exactly as they were on the last day that the factory was opened, and more than a decade after closure they are still here, albeit damp.
There's a photo of an old Fletcher's lorry here, among some old typewriters.
Check this out! It's an old stamp, still with ink pad.
Moving on from the offices, we decided to check out the loading bays.
From here, all the paper would be loaded into a lorry and sent off into the world. And if we really think about it, if Fletchers really did produce 85% of Britain's paper, from cigarettes to tissue paper, from 1921 until 2001, then chances are nearly every British person born in the 20th Century has probably wiped their arse or blown their nose with tissue that has passed through here.
That's kinda mindblowing.
There's a box here of all those pink plastic things that were on the rollers in the finishing area. What are these?
Moving on from here, we ducked into what seems to be the generator room. It was smelly and soggy, somehow seeming to have an additional decade or so of decay over the rest of the mill. Perhaps there were a few billion leaks in the ceiling here. It had certainly seen better days.
The decay is pretty bad. Most parts of the factory have that time capsule vibe, and I could very easily imagine the machines still functioning with a little TLC. There's no chance of that in this area.
Well... this wasn't my favourite part of the building, to put it mildly.
We've covered the offices, the infirmary and the family history. Now it's time to check out the paper manufacturing process!
In regards to that, I've approached this mill from completely the wrong end. I started my adventure at the endpoint of the papers journey, and I'm working my way up to where it started, which means any information I provide on the machinery and the role it plays will be in reverse order.
So to summarise how paper is made, they get a load of wood pulp, or pulp made from flax, hemp and old linen, and they clean it, add any required chemicals, bleach it and then break it down into fibres. With cigarette paper, the pulp would also be mixed with calcium carbonate to ensure it burns at a desired rate. The pulp is then mixed with water to create a slurry. This is then spread out onto a mesh screen. It's then fed through rollers which squeeze out the water, and compress the fibres into a more solid sheet. The paper-to-be is then fed through heated rollers to dry it.
These rollers can be adjusted for thickness and density, which is quite handy for making cigarette paper.
Of course, that's a very abridged version and any paper scientists (real ones, not the ones sent in by Cliff Michelmore) will be no doubt be pulling their hair out, and writing angry comments for me to lovingly ignore.
So let's go check out those rollers!
So these are presumably the rollers, although a more accurate name would be a "fourdrinier machine" due to it originally being patented by two chaps called Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier.
The paper slurry was spread on a wire mesh, and the rollers would squeeze all the water out of it, and smooth it. Heated cylinders would evaporate the last of the water and dry it into paper.
In 1973 there was a series of incidents at the factory. This wasn't anything new, if I'm honest. There was always something going horribly wrong. Sometimes people lost limbs and sometimes store rooms burned down. In the early 20th Century, a policeman's child fell into the mill reservoir and drowned. These stories are insanely common. But nevertheless, from what I can tell, Fletcher's original mill had the most bloodshed and scandal. A cleaner called Beatrice Dewhurst fell to her death through a trap door in 1915, and there was an embarrassing heist in 1979. Three men just entered the premises with a lorry and crane, and stole two large electric engines from under the noses of a factory full of people. Each engine was worth £4000. Police told the media "it seems everyone at the mill thought that someone else had authorised the removal of the engines."
That's actually hilarious.
But here in 1973, whatever happened seemed to be the last proverbial straw. I guess the incidents occurred due to exhaustion because the mill introduced a new rule that there would be no more overtime.
And I guess the pay must have been abysmal because more than 300 workers went on strike. The factory was forced to run on a skeleton crew of six, but one of those was arrested for driving his car through the picket line, injuring a protester.
It sounds like a scene from modern day America.
Similarly sounding as absurd as modern day America was a news headline in 1979. The Peak Park Planning board wanted to build a camp near the factory, and the factory opposed it. The papers reported "A factory which makes cigarette paper has won a battle to save itself from pollution caused by healthy out-door types."
What the hell kind of headline is that?
The council also found the entire thing absurd so that's somewhat reassuring.
Fletcher's started to fall on hard times in the 1980s. Apparently this was due to economic conditions and a fall in demand for products. Studies had drawn correlations between smoking and lung cancer, and this saw a rapid decline in cigarette usage. Smoking in the UK declined by 30% between 1974 and 1986. Bizarrely the media in 1986 called it "Anti-smoking propaganda," which also sounds like something that the modern day American media would say. Aren't they currently referring to basic human empathy as terrorism? That's what this reminds me of.
If anything, I guess we can take it as a small comfort. If the media called it anti-smoking propaganda today, they'd be laughed at. It's normal now for cigarette packs to have warnings on, and people smoke with knowledge of the health risks. It's difficult to believe that only forty-ish years ago the phrase "anti-smoking propaganda" was even considered by a serious journalist. So as absurd and bonkers as the world sometimes gets... it will pass.
There's a fun analogy. Smoking causes cancer, and contains the active ingredient, Metaphor, one of a group of problem-solving medicines used to treat literal thinking.
But anyway, back in the land of the sane (When I'm the voice of sanity in this world, you know we're fucked), in 1981 the original mill axed 280 jobs, which was just half of its workforce. And then in 1986 Flectcher's was snatched up by a company called Melton Medes, headed by the enigmatic businessman Nat Puri. Nat Puri had come from India with nothing but a degree in maths and £375. Initially he worked as an engineer, but ended up amassing enough money to buy the firm that he worked for, and then just made a habit of snapping up dying businesses and turning them around. Melton Medes was some kind of business borg, the Disney of the industrial sector. Fletchers was their twelfth acquisition in three years.
And managing things at Fletchers now was Nat Puri's cronie, James Phillpots.
And I know we shouldn't judge people based on appearance, but doesn't he have one of those faces you'd just love to punch?
(Photo not mine, obviously)
The folks at Fletcher's certainly thought so! These guys were not popular. Up until then, both factories had been run by the same management team, but Phillpots separated them, making them their own distinct entities, but retained the Robert Fletcher name for the sake of day-to-day selling and purchasing supplies. Or just making sure someone else's name was on it when it all went tits up.
And things did. In the 1990s there was a huge scandal when Nat Puri was found to have stolen £5 million from the employees pensions.
I'm no expert in management, but I don't think this is good for staff morale.
Luckily, he was stopped.
Predictably, in the 1990s financial problems continued to increase. There was an increased cost of materials and reduced demand, and also a drop in popularity of the type of paper being used due to the chlorine. There were a few media panics about the level of dioxin coming from the mill, and the risk of chlorine discharges. It all looked pretty grim.
In 1997 this factory alone had a turnover of almost 18 million. Although another source said the company had a turnover of 16 million in 1990, so one of those is probably false. But it's fairly inconsequential because by 1999 this had dropped to 8 million. It's a huge drop either way.
I'd still be quite happy if I was making 8 million, but apparently the overlords at Melton Medes weren't. Initially only the original paper mill closed in 2000, in order to create more work here, but it was too little too late, and this factory closed in 2001.
Communication was minimal and the closure was very sudden. Apparently workers arrived to start their shift and were just told to pack up their things and go home. And that's what led to this place being such a time capsule. Vandalism and looting aside, this paper mill is left as it was on that day in 2001, ready for a busy day making cigarette paper. Even on my visit, the entire place could have probably been brought back to life with a little TLC.
Instead they demolished it.
There's a tiny office overlooking the fourdrinier machines. I guess this would have been where the supervisor got his pressure sores.
But he's got a games machine, which is pretty cool. I can't help but feel sorry for him though. It says "2002" on it, which means it was brand new when the factory closed. It can't have had much use, and probably still works.
Here's the door to a tiny, very easy to miss staff room that looks like Hulk has exploded all over the walls. It's labelled "The Play Room" and no Welsh people are allowed.
I guess they play a little too rough for these boys.
Let's slip inside!
There's still a chair at the little desk, with a newspaper. That could well be posed by photographers, but there's still a lot of historic authenticity here. The locker doors have been decorated by the previous owners.
The newspaper is dated 2001, which means someone probably brought this in shortly before the factory closed, maybe read it on their break, left it here, and it never moved again.
This employee decided to personalise his locker with loads of naked ladies. The one next to him decorated his with amusing headlines.
And I kinda feel like the men who decorate their lockers with naked ladies are a bit cringe. I feel like every workplace has that one colleague who is just overly, almost performatively horny, and you know that every conversation with them is going to be about who they want to shag.
I tend to think that the straighter a man tries to portray himself, the gayer he probably is. One time, a couple of jobs ago, my horny colleague said that I looked familiar, and I jokingly, but dryly, told him that I used to be in gay porn. He went so red that I could have stopped traffic with him.
The staff room has a shower.
Above the door is a sign pointing deeper into the factory, referring to it as the Beer Walk. We'll get to that. But first, check out this little control room!
This is very cool!
And there's a few more offices and other little bits that lead off from here. It was a bit of a labyrinth.
I think this is some sort of industrial vacuum cleaner.
The natural decay here is beautiful. We're completely indoors but the greenery is slowly taking over.
It's weird to think that someone who worked here had a coffee in this mug, put it down somewhere for the last time, fully expecting to come back in the morning and have another coffee. Now a decade later it's full of rain water and has its own eco system.
This is so cool. There are still keys hanging on the hooks. There are still overtime and holiday request sheets hanging on the clipboards. It's been over a decade, but this is all untouched.
Here's an old stacker machine.
And check out all the plants growing here. It's so cool.
Onto the best part of any abandoned building, the toilets.
Still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs
This is the area that the sign referred to as The Beer Walk, and it is a huge room full of machines called "Beaters."
The beaters are tile-lined tubs that would receive the paper pulp fibres after they were bleached and washed. The pulp would pass through a heavy roller, and stainless steel blades would macerate and break up the fibres. The resulting product would be something like white porridge, ready to be cleaned and passed through the fourdrinier rollers.
These beaters were created by a company called Bertram, who were one of the oldest manufacturers of paper-making machinery in the world before they went into liquidation in 1988.
Some of these machines are pretty ancient, dating back to the 1930s, which is either testament to how great Bertram were, that their machines still functioned after seventy years, or testament to how downhill Fletchers had fallen, seeing as they hadn't upgraded in over half a century.
Everything from the beaters up to the pulp bleaching area was known as the "top mill" and I think it's the oldest surviving part of the building.
From here, we go through these doors to get to the rest of the top mill.
It's big and vast here. I'm not sure if it was mainly for holding stock or if there were machines here that have since been moved. But it has elevators and stairs to higher levels.
This big iron testicle is one of the pans. My photo doesn't really convey the size of these things. You could easily park a car on that platform underneath it.
The iron testicles were basically giant spherical boilers that would rotate and cook the pulp for several hours in a mild alkali solution to get rid of any oil and organic contaminants, before depositing it down onto that big metal pan, ready to be taken to the potchers.
Conveyance machines were used to take the paper pulp from the pans to the potchers. The pulp would need to be pitch-forked onto these conveyance machines, and it was apparently a smelly and physically demanding job. Apparently a more modern conveyor was installed but since it was unreliable they stuck to the old fashioned methods.
The potchers washed the pulp, but this required a vast amount of water. It was then that the pulp was bleached in sodium hydrochlorite.
Following this, the bleached pulp was sent to the beaters.
There's a little walkway that goes behind the big metal testacles, no doubt for the sake of loading and maintenance.
Moving up the building, it gets a lot soggier and a lot greener.
I'm pretty sure this is the pulping area, where bales of hemp, wood, and flax would be made into a pulp, ready to be boiled in the iron testicles.
Here's a little observation platform
There's this cool disk hanging from a chain. I'm amazed nobody has cut that down at some point in the past decade. I'm not sure what it could be used for.
There's an old basket here for carrying the materials for pulping
And here's some kind of pulp dumbwaiter. I don't know what this could have been for. The easiest way to find out is to wrongly speculate on the internet, because someone is sure to correct me.
It's the employee slide down to the carpark.
Next to this scale we can actually see a bale of flax left behind. Flax was actually one of the preferred methods of producing cigarette paper because it didn't leave a bad taste when it burned. Had the factory lasted even just a few more months, that exact bale of flax would have ended up as someone's cigarette.
The bales were apparently cut into desired chunks up here, before being taken to the boilers.
And its strange to think, we have the raw materials here, and we have all the machines. We could, in theory, make this into paper. The factory was still operational when it closed, and nothing has happened to any of it except a good decade or so of inactivity. It might all still be functional.
Onto the bleaching area!
Here we have the vats where the pulp was bleached white using sodium hydrochlorite.
I have to wonder, given that the machines and staff belongings, the office computers and even the flax itself is left behind, are these vats still full of chemicals after all these years?
Given the environmental implications, probably not. But it's fun to imagine.
There's a little staff room up here too.
And as before, we have a load of lockers decorated with images of attractive women.
I had to censor the woman's vagina with another kind of cunt, not because I think Vaginas should be censored, but because some gimp had put a sticker there advertising their YouTube channel. I assume the ladies breasts had stickers too, but someone else has ripped them off.
Using a boob to advertise a youtube channel has got to be the worst thing you could do to a boob. Boobs are better than your youtube channel! Leave them alone!
The entire act of leaving urbex stickers around is stupid. No urbexer has ever gone into an abandoned place, seen a sticker advertising someone else's platforms and thought "Oh cool, when I get home I'm going to waste my evening looking at the exact same place I've just seen with my own eyes, this time with blurry footage, chavvy commentary, some dudes weird head in the footage more than the actual place, and probably in the dark."
Seriously why were the staff here so horny? What is it about paper manufacturing that gets people in the mood?
Wouldn't it be funny if one of these women decided to get into urbex, and then found herself in some dudes locker?
There's one more bathroom stop...
This is probably the creepiest urinal I have ever seen. It's not even a cubicle. This is a crack in the wall that someone has fit a urinal into. What if a fat person needs to piss?
And with that, it's time to leave.
I have a couple of other external shots of interesting things, which I managed to snap before the security caught us. Whoopsie!
And that's it for Fletcher's. It's a well trodden urbex hotspot, and I have attempted to do what I always do, which is take my research one teeny step beyond what other people have written in the past. It's a challenge in a place that's been done so thoroughly, but I think I managed it.
Fletcher's Paper Mill has since been demolished. It's entirely possible that we were among the last ones to venture inside before the end, and that's pretty cool. I think I prefer that over being the first. In fact any urbexer who prides themselves on being the first is an idiot. When you're the last, you have the opportunity to create something inimitable.
As a saving grace, for car enthusiasts out there, one chunk of Fletcher's legacy does still exist. In 1985 the managing director Gordon Horn donated his Jaguar 420G to the Jaguar museum in Coventry. It's apparently a bit of a rarity, and has corgi heads on the panels behind the seats, leading Gordon to suspect it may have been built to chauffeur a royal family member around.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
I guess it's something to look out for if I'm ever in Coventry.
I really enjoyed this adventure, and I really enjoyed the research. It was a real privilege to be able to see it all before it was gone forever.
That's all I've got. As always, if you want to keep up with my blog then the best way to see updates is to follow my social media. I'm on Boomer 4Chan, otherwise known as Facebook. And I'm on Instagram, although shadow-banned to smithereens. I don't think anyone there actually sees my posts anymore.
Don't bother adding me on Twitter. I'm sort of a bit uncomfortable using that website, ever since its AI was used to undress women and children without their consent, and Elon Musk called everyone a fascist for wanting to ban the feature that freely created kiddie porn. I gotta draw the line somewhere. I'm not going to use Twitter anymore. It won't impact Twitter whatsoever, but this is about personal standards rather than making a difference. It's a dark and angry place, and I don't want to partake.
Instead, find me on Bluesky, Vero and Cara. They're all very light-hearted apps for creative people, and basically give us what Twitter and Instagram used to be before they were shit. You actually see the people you choose to follow. How outrageous!
Thanks for reading!
