| What: | Historic mill site (first recorded 1439) |
| Where: | GL6 7QN A46 Stroud/Cheltenham/Gloucester main road |
| Then: | Variety of uses as a mill site - cloth, corn, brewery, brickmakers |
| Now: | A number of businesses now occupy the site including an antique centre (previously a sofa company) and the Royal Mail (new depot building, formerly Great Mills). Many of the old buildings survive. |
Salmon's Mill is first recorded in 1439, when it was held of the manor of Painswick by William Bliss. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a fulling-mill, owned and worked by the Fletcher family. Edmund Fletcher rebuilt the timber-framed mill house in stone at the end of the 16th century. Today, the house survives, surrounded by 19th and 20th century industrial buildings, and has datestones of 1593 and 1607.
Later, the mill was sometimes used for corn and sometimes for cloth. By 1749, the mill was being worked by John Pinfold, clothier, and in 1786, it comprised both fulling and corn mills with a dyehouse attached. It was being worked as a corn mill by William Drew in 1820 and a malthouse was recorded there in 1822. It belonged soon afterwards to the Marling family of clothiers, who leased it to Messrs. Biddell & Bishop.
A new phase in the life of the site began in 1855, when N.S. Marling leased the mill to Thomas Godsell, brewer and maltster, who worked it as a corn mill in conjunction with his brewing business in the 1870s. A brickyard and kilns were also built on the site at this time. The brewery business, later called Godsell & Sons, expanded rapidly, and the site also included a distillery from the early 20th century.
The firm was taken over by the Stroud Brewery Co. in 1928, and in 1934 the mill was demolished and replaced by a brick beer-bottling factory. Malting ceased in 1967 and the beer-bottling plant closed two years later. Whitbreads Ltd., who had acquired the Stroud Brewery Co., then used it as a storage depot for some years, and in 1972 about 100 people were employed there. The former malthouse and several other 18th and 19th century buildings survive.
Revised 2018 EMW
From January 2016, this website is managed by Stroud Local History Society 
