Report - Fletchers Papermill, Oldham - June 12

[Fudge]

Visited this one with Shhh and a whole lot of help from The Lone Ranger - cheers for that!

This one began with a nice drive over the hills into the land of Fletcher's where we met with TLR and got a few words of advice along with an extremely handy map. I didn't actually know any of the history of this building, I just knew it existed, but after reading up on the building I've managed to piece together the building's history in my mind. The source that helped me most was this nice, simple excerpt taken from GeoVdub's report - hope he doesn't mind.

As a business, Fletchers was established in the early 19th century as a paper bleaching and manufacturing company.

Towards the late 90’s the two mills of Robert Fletcher & Son Ltd started to struggle. The increased cost of wood pulp and energy combined to make it tough financially. In 1997 the greenfield site had a turnover of nearly £17m and shareholder funds exceeded £9m. By 1999 turnover was down to £8.2m and the shareholders funds had dwindled to little over £4m.

In 2000 in an effort to save the business going to the wall resulted in the closure of the Stoneclough site and 120 job losses resulted from the closure although 50 new jobs would be created at the Greenfield site. Despite this move the company continued to spiral into financial ruin and in July 2001 several suppliers and creditors formally applied to wind up the company and resulted in the closure, overnight, of the Greenfield site.

After navigating our way through the woods and dodging (or not dodging as the case was) the locals, we were there. The first building we came across was a beautiful stone house that looked to be from the Georgian era. Presumably it was the mill owner's house when the whole place was in operation. Weirdly, the whole place is still furnished and in perfect condition, it is possible that it could be used by the police when training their dogs like with the rest of the site. We then delved deeper into the woods and found our first industrial building of the day - which I forgot to get an external shot of - the smaller of the two mill buildings. We didn't actually enter the bigger of the two but peering through the glass bricks to the rear it looked promising; a return visit is definitely on the cards.

Anyone that wants to join for the return visit to the bigger building - get in touch.

Thanks for looking, as always the pictures aren't brilliant but I'm slowly learning. Practice makes perfect!​