1867 was a significant year for Barrow with the glittering opening of Devonshire Dock coming just weeks after the formal incorporation of the town as a municipal borough. The Furness Railway built a substantial depot on the north side of Devonshire Dock which housed a bonded warehouse (a secure location for goods on which Customs duty had not yet been paid) and a railway goods warehouse.

Behind that, in 1870/1, the builder William Gradwell constructed the Barrow Steam Cornmill for the eponymous company established to run it. Four grain silos were later built on the dockside. Sold to Walmsley and Smith in 1880, it was known locally by their name throughout its life even after Liverpool’s Edward Hutchinson assumed ownership in 1903. Eventually reduced to milling animal feed, it closed in 1967 and the ground floor was leased to Docker’s Fruit & Vegetable Wholesalers but their use, together with the mill itself, came to a sad end in a fire in 1972.

The buildings are well pictured against the smoky, industrial background of inter-wars Barrow. Given their prominence and location, these buildings might easily have been collateral damage in an air raid on the docks and the shipyard across the water; nearby housing in Newland Street suffered in this way. In fact they seem to have come through the ‘Barrow Blitz’ pretty well – though they were not totally unscathed. 

On the night of Saturday 3rd/Sunday 4th, a parachute mine dropped into Devonshire Dock, closer to the warehouse side, but did not explode. It took until Tuesday lunchtime, May 6th, for preparations to be made to protect as much of the surrounding area as possible and the mine was ‘touched off’. Details of the consequences are rather thin but it is hard to imagine that all the nearby windows survived intact.