diff --git a/scrapy/tests/test_downloadermiddleware.py b/scrapy/tests/test_downloadermiddleware.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..bdbde8e43
--- /dev/null
+++ b/scrapy/tests/test_downloadermiddleware.py
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+from twisted.trial.unittest import TestCase
+from twisted.python.failure import Failure
+
+from scrapy.http import Request, Response
+from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
+from scrapy.core.downloader.middleware import DownloaderMiddlewareManager
+from scrapy.utils.test import get_crawler
+from scrapy.stats import stats
+
+
+class ManagerTestCase(TestCase):
+
+    settings_dict = None
+
+    def setUp(self):
+        self.crawler = get_crawler(self.settings_dict)
+        self.spider = BaseSpider('foo')
+        self.spider.set_crawler(self.crawler)
+        self.mwman = DownloaderMiddlewareManager.from_crawler(self.crawler)
+        # some mw depends on stats collector
+        stats.open_spider(self.spider)
+        return self.mwman.open_spider(self.spider)
+
+    def tearDown(self):
+        stats.close_spider(self.spider, '')
+        return self.mwman.close_spider(self.spider)
+
+    def _download(self,request, response=None):
+        """Executes downloader mw manager's download method and returns
+        the result (Request or Response) or raise exception in case of
+        failure.
+        """
+        if not response:
+            response = Response(request.url, request=request)
+        def download_func(**kwargs):
+            return response
+        dfd = self.mwman.download(download_func, request, self.spider)
+        # catch deferred result and return the value
+        results = []
+        dfd.addBoth(results.append)
+        self._wait(dfd)
+        ret = results[0]
+        if isinstance(ret, Failure):
+            ret.raiseException()
+        return ret
+
+
+class DefaultsTest(ManagerTestCase):
+    """Tests default behavior with default settings"""
+
+    def test_request_response(self):
+        req = Request('http://example.com/index.html')
+        resp = Response(req.url, status=200, request=req)
+        ret = self._download(req, resp)
+        self.assertTrue(isinstance(resp, Response), "Non-response returned")
+
+
+class GzippedRedirectionTest(ManagerTestCase):
+    """Regression test for a failure when redirecting a compressed
+    request.
+
+    This happens when httpcompression middleware is executed before redirect
+    middleware and attempts to decompress a non-compressed body.
+    In particular when some website returns a 30x response with header
+    'Content-Encoding: gzip' giving as result the error below:
+
+        exceptions.IOError: Not a gzipped file
+
+    """
+
+    def test_gzipped_redirection(self):
+        req = Request('http://example.com')
+        body = '<p>You are being redirected</p>'
+        resp = Response(req.url, status=302, body=body, request=req, headers={
+            'Content-Length': len(body),
+            'Content-Type': 'text/html',
+            'Content-Encoding': 'gzip',
+            'Location': 'http://example.com/login',
+        })
+        ret = self._download(request=req, response=resp)
+        self.assertTrue(isinstance(ret, Request),
+                        "Not redirected: {0!r}".format(ret))
+        self.assertEqual(ret.url, resp.headers['Location'],
+                         "Not redirected to location header")