Mumfords Mill

 Working up the Greenwich Creekside towards Lewisham we have at last come to a site which has on it something visible – old (well oldish - its only just over 120 years old) and ex-industrial, and converted to flats (of course).  It’s also the subject of a very nice booklet written by Jonathan Clarke for English Heritage in 1999 – as well as an article in a Lewisham History Journal (NO 8 2000) ND numerous other reports and blogs, which makes it all the easier for me to write and – I guess – to cheat, this time round.

This is, of course, the site of Mumford’s Mill. It is on a surprisingly small site though for such a big and impressive building.   On the maps you can see how small it is compared with its neighbours – which for much of its history have been timber and building supplies wharves both upstream and downstream of it.  Jonathan Clarke describes the main building – which was built as a grain silo - now on site as ‘visually arresting and technologically sophisticated’.  The architect was so important that Mumford’s isn’t even listed among his less important buildings, let alone his big stuff.

 So, what is the background to it?? It appears that there had been a mill here since the 1790s -built of timber and powered by the tide.  In the early 19th century members of the Ritchie family appear to own it – as they did some other wharves – and it was later owned by members of the Carpenter family.  Both of these seem to have been prosperous businessmen – William Ritchie had married a Miss Pitcher at Northfleet, where the Pitchers were major ship builders. William Carpenter was an ‘extensive miller’ who also owned a specialist farm near East Grinstead.  

Part of the background is also the change throughout the 19th century to flour milling.  There is a sort of idea that in the past the Jolly Miller (usually in a windmill) ground Farmer Giles’ corn and then Mr Bun the Baker baked the bread for local people.  Perhaps that did happen once long ago but there were as a many – probably more – rural watermills as windmills.   They may have also had a Jolly Miller and  been by a bubbling brook but in urban locations and on bigger rivers there were tide mills – which is what we had at Deptford Bridge (more about that to come in a future article too).  Tide mills certainly weren’t about anything other than shifting a lot of grain and producing a lot of flour – and other things too, because mills certainly weren't just about milling corn.  However the mills at Deptford Bridge – Mumford’s, Robinson’s, and others – were part of urban large scale flour milling – and in their turn within a century they also became too small and thus defunct. 

Peter and Samuel Pretyman Mumford had had a flour mill at Catford and a granary just off the Strand and then took over this old wooden tide powered mill in 1848.  In Europe and beyond, in the late 19th century a revolution in flour milling took place with a radical transformation in technology, as well as work organisation and locations. There was a change from traditional stone milling to roller milling and it was accompanied by an ambitious approach to architecture to match the increasing sophistication and ingenuity of the machinery although it was in an ever fiercer commercial environment.   As well as Deptford Peter Mumford also took on the Royal Flour Mills on the Albert Embankment where he also installed roller milling and he was named as one of the pioneers of the process in England

Both the Royal Flour Mill and Mumford’s Mill at Deptford were designed by Aston Webb, one of the country’s leading architects – he had designed the frontage of Buckingham Palace, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Admiralty Arch and much,much more.  At Deptford it is his enormous silo which people see and this was clearly an advertisement on this relatively small site, for the modernisation and efficiency of this urban mill.  No more Mr. Jolly Miller – but large scale, grand, and wealthy as we;; as technologically superefficient

The mill was fitted out by Henry Simon, who led the ‘roller milling revolution' in this country to replace traditional mill stones. A German refugee, Simon had arrived penniless and built up an engineering practice which transformed the 'slow, laborious and costly' batch milling into one of the most 'highly mechanised industries in the world'.

When Jonathan Clarke wrote in 1999 he said that the earliest surviving components were a brick, early 19th century site office and two early 19th century three storey stone grinding flour mills, the East Mill and the West Mill. He thought that change came gradually to this old mill site.  Grain came to the Creekside wharf in barges and was then screened and cleaned. It was milled in the two – east and west – mills and then bagged, stored and dispatched in buildings to the south and near the site entrance. It all made sense like that.  Gradually there was a change to use roller milling and this needed steam, rather than water, power. So an engine and boiler house was added.

The important change was that to roller milling which was developed through the late 19th century.  It would have meant the gradual inclusion of increasingly sophisticated machinery.  Clarke gives a short description of what this would have meant and some diagrams which explain it. The wheat needed to be cleaned.  It was then reduced to flour, along with ‘middlings' and bran, and next the ‘middlings’ ere turned into into flour.  The sort of flour produced and what it was to be used for was an important part of this and made a difference as to how it was to be handled.  He comments that ‘the technological advances in terms of integration, efficiency, capacity of plant ….was surely fairly striking’. Larger and larger rolling machines were introduced.

In 1897 the huge grain silo was built to the ‘elaborately Italianate designs of Aston Webb’.  Facing the creek and probably relating an earlier granary it embodied advanced techniques of internal metal framing, with a grid of rolled steel beams supported at their intersections by cast-iron columns to produce a ‘fire-proof’ structure. It was probably manufactured and fitted by Henry Simon Ltd., whose firm was responsible for the greatest number of roller installations nation-wide.  The construction of the silo was probably accompanied by the insertion of steel-framed doors in the East Mill to support of heavier roller-milling machinery, and a larger wheat-cleaning wing, also internally supported by steel members. In the twentieth century electric power was used and a canteen, a smithy and garage were added.

The outside of the silo building is decorated with diaper brickwork which incorporated large 'M's and crosses – and this was praised when an illustration of it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. There are large inscriptions at the top of the building showing ‘1790, 1897, Mumford’s Greenwich Flour Mills’ and ’S P Mumford & Co’. On the Creek frontage the only sign of the use of the building would she been the steam powered grain elevator which automatically scooped loose wheat from the  barge, weighed it, and  sifted it before moving it to storage bins

Peter Mumford's Royal Flour Mills in Lambeth was eventually to be severely damaged in a fire, and our Deptford mill also suffered a number of fires. Following that automatic sprinkler systems were installed and Peter Mumford founded a special Mills Insurance Company which he chaired and which only offered policies to those with sprinklers.

In the 20th century technological change accelerated, while government policies tended to reduce demand for home produced flour, From 10,000 mills in 1880 there were only 1000 in 1917. Huge milling companies evolved – the Co-op, Rank and Spillers – and set up organisations to exclude smaller millers. Their super-efficient mils did not bother to look grand and/or dramatic, and were purely functional. There was the now demolished Central Granary in the Millwall Docks – and many of us in Greenwich can just see over the River to Spillers highly functional Millennium Mill in the Royal Docks.

Mumford’s survived into the mid-1960s by specialising in cake flours. After that the building was used by a succession of small industrial units until it was bought out by developers.  Of course that dramatic silo building had to be kept. 

Work to convert the large original buildings, especially the silo, into flats called ‘Mumford Mills’ was completed in 2005 by Rees Mellish Ltd. There are 36 flats plus a penthouse and four shell unit apartments. The entire shell of the building has been kept– including the decorative frieze, brickwork and stone. There is a communal garden above a secure stacker car parking and inevitably it is gated and ‘prestigious’.

In front of the mill on the Greenwich High Road frontage were a couple of buildings used as offices. They have now been rebuilt and extended to look like the terrace of houses that they never were – and I think that is a pity as they originally provided  break in scale but now just add to the boring continuous frontage which development has provided along Greenwich High Road.

I have quoted Jonathan Clarke’s booklet on the mill extensively here and would very much recommend people to read it. There are many pages of detailed description not just of the dramatic architecture but of the machinery and process within the mill and there are many many pictures. I have no idea if it is still available, it was published by English Heritage, and I have given details of the Lewisham History Journal article above. 

There are of course also web sites about roller milling and Mumford’s is often included in them – but most of the web sites you will find searching under ‘Mumford’s’ will lead to endless sites trying to sell you one of those flats in the silo!