A Malt Mill once stood behind what is now the solicitor’s office at 17 Castle Street, Reading. Brewing on the site in what is described in sale particulars as a freehold Elizabethan residence began in about c.1840s by Thomas Rickford. Latterly it belonged to Blandy, Hawkins and Company, who were brewing on this site until 1920. The earliest of the insurance maps of Reading, published by Charles Goad in 1895, shows the mill and the water-wheel, and names them as such.
