The tower was brick-built, with a slight taper. At the base it was 30 feet (9.1 m) in diameter, with 3-foot (0.91 m) thick walls. At the gallery located at the top, it was 20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter with 18-inch (460 mm) walls. The gallery chamber was surrounded by a cornice and parapet, with an iron balustrade. The gallery was 163 feet (50 m) high and was reached by a spiral staircase attached to the inside face of the wall. Halfway up there was a floor for making small lead shot. The gallery level at the top was used for making large shot.
In a lecture given in 1991 (now preserved in the British Library Sound Archive) Hugh Casson, who had been the Director of Architecture for the Festival of Britain in 1951, described the tower as "an extraordinary device. It's a factory chimney, with a staircase inside it, and you take hot lead up to the top, and you drop it down, in drops, and the drops don't make tears as you'd expect, to get thicker as they go, they're absolutely perfect globes, and they're tiny, you see, as you know, I mean, they're absolutely wee, like the shot you get inside a cartridge. And there were two old men, one at the bottom and one at the top. The one at the top was the one with the hot lead, and he dropped it down into a cold bucket at the bottom, and it cooled it off at once, and then it was taken away and sold. And these two old boys were rather like two old fishermen in a boat, they'd been there for years. And they didn't speak, most of the time they were separated by 150 feet of shaft." .[1]