DEE MILLS and OLD DEE BRIDGE - 1901. This photograph was taken by Frank Simpson in 1902 when the mills were out of action and the old castle prison or county gaol was being demolished. In the right foreground, the original wall had been built out into the river to provide a walk but there was no through road. The original county gaol and most of the Norman parts of the castle were demolished following Acts of Parliament in 1788 and 1807. A new gaol and Assize court were erected by Thomas Harrison, designer of the Grosvenor Bridge, but by 1900 the gaol was condemned and demolished the following year. A new road from Bridge Gate to the Water Gate was built. From Bridge Street to the Grosvenor Bridge it was called Castle Drive and beyond that to the Watergate, Nuns Road, named after the nunnery which stood on Nuns field (where the Police Headquarters are now) up to the Reformation. The area seen here was a very busy part of Chester's mediaeval port. The gate through the walls at this point was called the Ship Gate (now re-erected in Grosvenor park) and down cobbled St. Mary's Hill to the gate trooped the pack horses from the centre of the city, to unload their goods onto the sailing ships anchored here.
All the muddle of buildings here were removed, with the Mills themselves going in 1905. In the late 1980s, County Hall, a dreary and unimpressive building, was started on this site and interruptions by war, completed in 1957.The view over Handbridge is bare - no Grammar School or High School, no Appleyards estate, no Western Command. It is remarkable how much the city has grown this century

OLD DEE MILLS AND BRIDGE 1903. 'There was a jolly miller once, lived on the River Dee. He worked and sang from morn till night, no lark more blithe than he'. No wonder Bickerstaffe could write this about the miller. He controlled a monopoly (with only one bridge into the City) and took for his milling fee a tithe or tenth of all the corn he milled. Over the centuries, the mills were owned by many families, the most notable being the Gamuls in the 17th century. An enterprising Mr Edward Ommaney Wrench , owned the mills until they burnt down in 1819, decided to move their business and so converted a disused cotton mill in Boughton by the canal. They used the newly discovered steam engine for milling. They prospered in Steam Mill Street, and expanded the mills until they became one of the largest milling firms in the country. The last owners of the Dee Mills were the Wrench family who held them until they closed in about 1895. They were pulled down a couple of years after this picture was taken and replaced by a hydroelectric station to provide power for electrification of the city's hams.
The weir or Causey channelled water to the mills and its existence for centuries gave rise to litigation. In 1608 citizens and others who had property on the banks of the river, resisted the monopoly of the mills and tried to remove the weir, because it caused flooding of their lands, injured their fishing and ruined their navigation. Commissioners who sat, decreed that one-third 'of the said Weyre be pulled down and the river there made open'. It wasn't carried out because an appeal to the judges said the Commissioners 'had no power to pull it down but only to abate it, if it had been enhanced.'

Victorian & Edwardian Chester By John Tomlinson A Deesider publication