William Champion was a Quaker industrialist who, in the 1740's, moved his copper, brass and zinc spelter works from Old Market, Bristol, to a green field site at Warmley. The site is thought to have been owned by his father Nehemiah Champion. Here William built his Paladian house, his works and a pin factory, as well as housing for his workers.
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. William was way ahead of his time in that he brought raw materials onto the Warmley site and sent finished products out. He used local coal, imported calamine (zinc bearing ore) from the Mendips and copper ore from Cornwall.
Before William's time, in Europe, only poor quality brass was made. It was produced by grinding calamine and copper ore, mixing the two together then heating it in a furnace to produce brass. As zinc comes off the heated ore as a gas a way had to be found to capture the zinc. William was the first to produce zinc in commercial quantities. To extract the zinc metal from calamine, William invented an enclosed condenser into which he put the crushed calamine, this was heated and the resulting gas was made to go down a tube at the base of the condenser into a bath of water thus crating zinc flakes. Now he was able to mix the copper and zinc in just the right quantities to make brass of varying qualities.
For his quiet pleasure William laid out gardens in the fashion of the time, with a mound, an elm walk, a semi-circular pond a series of grottoes and a lake in which placed an enormous concrete statue of Neptune, decorated with slag from the works. It is thought that these elements Were taken from Greek myths, The mound represemts the mountain on which Zeus lived in a grove of twelve oaks, the lake represents the Styxs over which the dead were rowed after death by the ferryman. Until recent times a penny was placed on the tongue of the dead before burial with which to pay the ferryman. The grottoes represent the underworld, the face of a large dog can be made out in the grottoes perhaps being Cerberus the dog who guards the underworld. Neptune, or perhaps more correctly Posiden, the god of the sea was built of concrete and decorated with slag from the works he can be seen in what was the lake. William dammed Warmley Brook to provide water for his works which formed a thirteen acre lake.