Madeley Wood Company

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.

[1] 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.

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.

Proximity of raw materials and the means of transporting the finished product persuaded the company to build a blast furnace at Blists Hill in 1832.

The furnace settings and blowing houses are now preserved, but unrestored, as part of the Blists Hill Victorian Town, one of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums.