A deserted dairy product factory in a small town in Somerset
WHEN TRAVELLING BETWEEN London and Cornwall, we often stop at the small town of Wincanton in Somerset. Close to the A303 trunk road, it has retained a certain ‘ye olde worlde’ charm. Once. It was a town with many coaching inns, but although many of these have closed, the buildings that housed them are still recognizable. One of the buildings on the main street houses a small museum of Wincanton. Amomgst the exhibits, there was a glass case containing old objects connected with the ‘Cow and Gate’ dairy products company. Amongst these, there were two glass feeding bottles used for feeding milk to babies.
The Cow and Gate company began life in 1882 as the ‘West Surrey Central Dairy Company’. In 1904, Dr Killick Millard developed a powdered milk, which in 1908 was marketed by the company as ‘Cow & Gate Pure English Dried Milk’. In 1929, the West Surrey Central Dairy Company Limited was renamed ‘Cow and Gate’. None of this information was available in the form of a label or information notice next to the Cow and Gate exhibit. So, I asked the lady looking after the museum why there were Cow and Gate exhibits in the museum. She explained that until (before [?]) the 1990s. Cow and Gate had a large factory in Wincanton, which had its own railway line, a branch of the now closed (in 1966) Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway.
We strolled downhill to the south of the old part of the town, and came across the former Cow and Gate factory. With three storeys, a centrally located clock tower. and windows fitted with Crittall frames, it is a fine example of interwar Modernist industrial architecture. Today, many of the windowpanes are broken and the building has a deserted, neglected appearance. Boards with the name of Myakka – a design company – are attached, but there was no sign of life within the building and the yard surrounding it. We could not enter the old factory, but Myakka have posted pictures of its interior on it company website (https://blog.myakka.co.uk/home/myakka-architecture/). Although nobody seems to remember who designed it, it is a well-known landmark in Wincanton. Everyone we asked directions to it, knew it well.
Over the years, Cow and Gate expanded, and needed a fleet of vehicles to transport its products all over the country. This led to them founding a logistics company, ‘Wincanton’, which is still thriving more than 70 years after it was formed. In 1958, Cow and Gate merged with United Dairies to become ‘Unigate’, which was taken over by Irish foods firm Greencore in 2011. As for the derelict Modernist factory in Wincanton, nobody seems to know what will become of it.
