Mill Floor One

The floor in this photograph is concrete, covered in a deep layer of dust. Debris from machinery that was removed or abandoned sits in scattered clusters across the surface. Light comes in through grimy multi-pane windows, falling in direct patches on the floor and picking out the texture of everything left behind. The space is vast and empty in a way that makes the scale of what was once here legible, even in its absence. The Mungo Scott Flour Mill stands on Smith Street, Summer Hill, on land that Mungo Scott Ltd acquired between 1916 and 1917 for £3,000 after it was found surplus to requirements by a freight railway project. Construction of the mill, store, and silos began in 1921. Milling operations commenced in June 1922. The building is five storeys, load-bearing brick walls with a timber post-and-beam internal structure and a hipped roof clad in metal sheeting. The tall, narrow form was not an aesthetic choice. It was structural logic: grain arrived by rail to the site's own siding, was raised to the top floor, and then fed downward by gravity through progressively finer rollers and sifters on each floor until it became flour, bagged and ready for dispatch. A fire on 13 January 1927 destroyed a flour store and part of the mill, with approximately 10,000 bags of flour and offal lost. The mill was rebuilt and continued operating. Concrete grain silos were added in the 1950s. Milling operations ran until 2009, when the site closed after 87 years. By 1 December 2008, when the final goods train arrived on the Rozelle Goods Line, the Mungo Scott mill was the sole remaining customer on that line. This photograph was made in 2014, five years after closure and in the same year the Stage 2 development approval was granted. The machinery is gone. The dust has settled. The timber post-and-beam structure that held the weight of grain and flour for nearly nine decades stands in the background. The windows let in what light they can.