Pylons

Rows of timber columns rise through the interior of the Mungo Scott Flour Mill on Smith Street, Summer Hill, each faced with red-painted pipes running vertically between floors. Diagonal timber boards cover the floor and graffiti marks one column in the mid-ground. A funnel-shaped metal object rests in the left foreground, below windows pushing grey light across the dust. Their scale is the first thing that registers: these are structural columns built to carry the distributed weight of industrial milling across a working floor. The mill itself opened in June 1922, constructed by Mungo Scott Ltd on land purchased from a resumed railway corridor. The five-storey building used load-bearing brick walls and a timber post-and-beam interior structure, a form chosen not for aesthetics but for function. Grain arrived at the site by rail on a dedicated siding, was raised to the upper floors, and then descended through progressively finer rollers and sifters, floor by floor, until it left the building as flour. Concrete silos were added to the site later, part of the capacity expansions that extended the mill's operational life through the mid-twentieth century. A fire on 13 January 1927 destroyed a flour store and part of the original mill. The operation was rebuilt and continued. By the late twentieth century the mill had passed through several operators, from the founding Mungo Scott Ltd to Goodman Fielder and then Allied Mills, each expanding the site's storage and processing capacity. The mill was eventually the sole remaining user of the Rozelle-Darling Harbour Goods Line, the railway infrastructure that had made the Summer Hill location viable in the first place. Milling operations ceased in 2009. This photograph was made in 2014, while the building stood empty ahead of its heritage-listed redevelopment. The columns remain, holding up a floor that no longer carries any load.