Madeley Wood Company - Bedlam Furnaces

Bedlam Furnaces

The Bedlam Furnaces were owned by this company, which held mineral leases in Madeley Parish, enabling it to extract coal and iron ore. The works were taken over by Abraham Darby III of the Coalbrookdale Company in 1776. When the company was reorganised in 1797, the Madeley Wood Works became separate from Coalbrookdale, continuing (in conjunction with the Ketley ironworks) in the hands of the Reynolds family who had been in partnership with the Darby family at Coalbrookdale since the 1760s. After Joseph Reynolds decided to concentrate on his bank, the Madeley Wood Company works passed to the Anstice family, one of whom had managed it, and their business became another Madeley Wood Company.

The name Bedlam Furnaces may have originated with a painting by John Sell Cotman(1782–1842) who painted the furnace in 1803 and titled it Bedlam Furnace Near Irongate, Shropshire. He was on tour with a fellow less well known artist called Paul Sandby Munn (1773–1845) who also painted the same subject and titled it Bedlam Furnace, Madeley Dale, Shropshire. It was both a metaphor (the place appeared to the painters to resemble a lunatic asylum), and simultaneously a jest at the expense of Fletcher of Madeley (1729–1785) a then famous Methodist preacher in whose parish the ironworks were located.

The site history through the 20th century is less well documented. Dense vegetation cover was allowed to establish itself amongst the ruins until the late 1950s when the site was subject to spoil dumping, which completely buried the furnace bases. In the 1970s what was to become the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust began clearing and restoring the works.