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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Sunday, 1st August 2010

 
3 APSLEY MILL

The MD's car at the mill entrance in the 1930s
APSLEY Mill, where it all started, began life as a corn mill belonging to the Abbey of St Albans.

By the time Dickinson’s celebrated its centenary in 1904 very little of the old paper mill - pictured here in the 1950s - that John Dickinson bought in 1809 remained.
It was in 1888 that the manufacture of paper at Apsley stopped, in favour of cards and envelopes.

The manufacture of card had begun there in 1831 and steadily increased so that by the turn of the century production was nearly 50 tons a week of everything from the finest ivory visiting cards to railway tickets.


The mill in the 1930s
Envelope making was introduced in 1850 and the envelope machines gradually took up much of the space of the paper making plant. In 1877 a special fireproof three-storey building was constructed for envelope production. For the opening a special dinner was given for all the workers and over 600 tucked in.

In 1927 part of the old mill was demolished and a new envelope department built on the site, which included a printing plant.

By this time packaging envelopes were very much on the scene, for everything from sandwich bags to kippers.

In 1933 the mill produced one hundred million envelopes in a week for the first time.
A new building for the card department was constructed in 1933 for £100,000 and covered all that was left of Salmon Meadow, for a long time the home of Apsley FC.


The mill in the 1950s
In the late 1930s Dickinson’s had big plans to expand Apsley and in the handbook issued to workers there was a picture of how the mills would look after the development.
Sadly the war years intervened and the plans were never implemented.

In 1963 the new stationery factory was opened on the Belswains Lane site, and in 1982 Princess Michael of Kent opened the £6m DRG Stationery complex at Apsley after a major reorganisation.

Then in 1988 came the plan for the giant new warehouse and a sell off of part of the site for the Sainsbury’s retail development.

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