This impressive brick and pantile Grade 2 listed building is about one-quarter of a mile long.

Its length enabled Hall's company to make very long ropes for marine use. 

William Hall, a wealthy Hull shipowner, established his rope making business in Barton in 1767.

The business remained in the hands of the Hall family until the twentieth century.

Among many important products of the ropery were anti-submarine nets made for national defence in World War two.

The Feather factory in Trinity Street was built in 1877 by F S Anderson and Co.

At the time it was one of several factories in the area processing goose feathers for bedware and the like.

The building has been converted into domestic flats.

Crushing linseed and rape seed was an important industry in Gainsborough in the nineteenth century.

The Ashcroft Oil Mill, alongside the Trent, was built in 1826 with a 9-storey brick tower mill as part of the complex.

Crushing ceased here in 1942 and the buildings were demolished in 1954.

This eighteenth century print depicts Luke Martin’s oil mill, i.e. a mill for crushing linseed to extract oil.

The location is on the high ground to the east of the town centre, with the parish church and Old Hall in the foreground.

The tower mill appears to have four common sails and a rounded cap winded by a braced tailpole.

Print, 1747

Grimsby Ice Factory, which commenced production in 1901, provided the crushed ice which was required to preserve the catch in Grimsby trawlers during their lengthy journey back from the fishing grounds of the North Sea.

More ice was then needed to pack the fish for its rail journey, for Grimsby fish was widely distributed around Britain.

This photograph shows the east elevation of the factory on Gorton Street.  Conveyors carry ice across the road for direct loading onto trawlers.

Sue Stone, GreatGIFT, 2008

The 1901 Ice Factory building has two gables on the Gorton Street elevation constructed in red brick with attractive windows, recesses, arches and other features.

The insertion of ground floor doors, a first floor window and a fire escape detract from the original fine design.

The much faded words THE GRIMSBY ICE COMPANY LTD can still be discerned between the moulded brick bands above the first floor.

Sue Stone, GreatGIFT, 2008

The tank room on the first floor of the original Ice Factory building.

The two tanks on this floor contained more than 3000 suspended metal cans, each of which held 2 cwt (101kg) of fresh water.

Cooling was achieved by an ammonia gas expansion system powered by vertical valve compressors coupled to 600 bhp induction motors.

Sue Stone, GreatGIFT, 2011

A view of the main compressor room which houses four vertical cylinder ammonia compressors manufactured by J&E Hall Ltd of Dartford, driven by Metropolitan Vickers 600 hp induction motors.

These were installed in 1930-34 to replace the original steam-powered plant without disruption to ice production. They are some of the largest ever made and are a unique survival.

Photo: Liz Humble, Purcell Miller Tritton

The can-filling equipment simultaneously filled a complete row of cans with a measured quantity of water. The water came from the factory's own fresh water boreholes situated at the dock.

The row of filled cans was then pushed forward in the refrigeration tank by screw-jacks to allow space for a new row of cans which had just been returned empty from the other end of the tank.

Photo: Liz Humble, Purcell Miller Tritton

At the end of the tank room a row of ice cans is lying in the tipping cradle where the 100 kg blocks of ice would have been emptied out onto the wooden handling platform before being sent to the crushers or for storage as blocks.

Photo: Liz Humble, Purcell Miller Tritton

Thorpe Hall Mill (TF 320871) was built in the eighteenth century as a papermill and was converted for corn grinding in about 1840.

At one time it was 5 storeys high and fifty feet long with an 18-foot waterwheel.

It continued in use as a corn mill until about 1920; in the recent past it has been used as a trout farm.

Print by J W Wilson, 1840

Thorpe Hall Mill (TF 320871) was built in the eighteenth century as a papermill and was converted for corn grinding in about 1840.

At one time it was 5 storeys high and fifty feet long with an 18-foot waterwheel.

It continued in use as a corn mill until about 1920; in the recent past it has been used as a trout farm.

Low mounds, scattered over several square miles in this part of the Marsh, are the ploughed over spoil heaps of an earlier salt industry (by the evaporation of sea water).

Individual ‘salterns’, like this one, can be identified with those shown on a Marshchapel parish map of 1595.

Frank Robinson, November 2013