Bringing a 250-Year-Old Waterwheel Back to Life : How 32mm Macalloy stainless steel bars helped a Grade II listed Georgian mill keep turning inside a private family home.
Products used : 32mm Stainless steel tenstion bars ,nuts, Bespoke plates and couplers.
Background:
Every so often a project comes along that reminds us why we love this industry. The Old Watermill in Hythe, Kent, a privately owned home built around a genuinely working 18th-century water mill is one of those projects, and we were proud to play a small part in its story.
A Building With Serious History
A mill has stood on Mill Road in Hythe in some form since at least 1685, when an earlier building on the site, Damer’s Mill, appeared on a historic map of the town. The current structure dates from 1773, when it was rebuilt under the ownership of the Piety family, and remarkably it has changed hands only a handful of times in the 250-plus years since.
By the 1830s, the mill had grown into a substantial four-storey building housing three, later four, pairs of grindstones, all driven by a large waterwheel. In the mid-1800s it became known as Burch’s Mill, after miller George Burch, and it continued producing flour right up until the early 20th century.
Commercial water milling eventually became uneconomical, and after decades of decline the mill fell silent. Its restoration, beginning in the 1960s, was a remarkable feat of conservation: by 1992, the waterwheel was turning again after 60 years of silence. The project went on to receive Hythe Civic Awards in 1991 and 1992, along with a Shepway Building Design Award, in recognition of the quality of that restoration.
Today, the mill is a Grade II listed building a rare example of working Georgian industrial heritage sitting inside a family home.
Macalloy Involement :
Keeping a structure like this, genuinely operational, takes more than sentiment, it takes serious engineering. To support the waterwheel and keep it turning safely for years to come, Macalloy specified and installed 32mm stainless steel threaded bars, along with bespoke nuts, couplers and plates.
Stainless steel threaded bar was the right choice here for two reasons: it offers the tensile strength needed to carry the loads generated by a large, continuously moving waterwheel, while its slim profile allows that support to be introduced without disrupting the historic fabric of a listed building. Getting that balance right ,modern structural performance sitting quietly behind centuries-old brick and timber is exactly the kind of challenge we relish.
Seeing It Turn Again
The owners kindly sent through photographs of the finished wheel in action. Seeing it turning again, fully supported and doing exactly what it was built to do nearly 250 years ago, made every part of this project worthwhile.
Projects like this don’t come along often, and we’re proud to have played a part in keeping this piece of Kent’s industrial history alive for the next generation.
Year
2026
Location
Kent
Country
UK
Architect
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