Windmills

 

I’ve been working on a new book about energy generation in Greenwich - all the power stations and everything.  I realised, rather to my surprise, that  I’ve never done anything about windmills.  There are people out there who start to be interested in industrial history and look first  at windmills - and they never get any further.  There is a whole culture out there of the minutia of windmill construction and use – so, I thought I should look at what there was in Greenwich and Woolwich.

 

I’m afraid the answer is going to be ‘not much’.  Traditional windmills are not particularly efficient energy providers and the local jolly Miller grinding the corn for Mr Baker may not have been that useful in a heavily industrialised area with a large population.  Of course there must have been many, many mills about which we know nothing – and inevitably this article can only be about those we do know about.

 

The one windmill which we do know a bit about was in Woolwich -  and I've written things about it before, some in a great deal of detail. This was the’ shipwright’s mill’ which I've covered in articles about the Royal Dockyard and also about the cooperative movement in Woolwich.

 

Mill Lane in Woolwich is a turning off Woolwich New Road and is on land once known as ‘Mill Hill’ because several windmills were apparently sited there, probably from the 15^th century. In the 17th century the Board of Ordnance owned land there, where they built a conduit and The Shipwrights Society from the Royal Dockyard got permission from them to build a mill and bakehouse there. The mill stood in ‘Conduit Field’ just off Woolwich New Road - then called called ‘Mill Lane’ or ‘Cholic Lane’ and it was slightly south of what is now called ‘Engineers House’.  A drawing from 1845, when it was vacant and derelict, shows an octagonal timber smock mill.  

 

In 1760 ‘the mill built by the Shipwrights ...... was consumed by fire’. It was thought ‘other local bakers’ were guilty of fire raising and there was some sort of presentation to the Lord Mayor to protest their innocence.  Presumably these locals were the operators of other mills in the area which we don't know anything about although they are described as ‘bakers’ not ‘millers’. So were ‘bakers’ operating mills and are the terms just interchangeable?  It should also be noted that every windmill I am aware of in Greenwich Borough area seems to have been milling corn to make flour, despite that there were numerous industries around with a need to grind other things.

 

The only windmill in the Borough of which there are any physical remains is that at the rear of The Old Mill pub in Old Mill Lane on Plumstead Common.  It was built in 1764 and so is possibly the earliest tower mill in this part of Kent.  It stopped working in the 1840’s, and in 1853 the Old Mill Public House was built adjacent to it and fronting the road.  It is now listed Grade II.

 

It is a four-storey brick tower which stands close behind the pub and which once had four sails and a domed cap.  Although it is very close to the pub building it seems completely independent and I wonder what it's used for now. It looks to be in good condition but I've never met anybody who's been inside it and would be very interested to know.

 

Moving to Greenwich and Deptford there seem to have been very few windmills. There are pictures of windmills in the Deptford area but they are most well in what is now Lewisham.

 

There is just one windmill on the Greenwich bank of Deptford Creek.  A tall white smock mill is shown alongside Deptford Creek in the background of a painting of Deptford Theatre dating from  1840 on land now covered by outbuildings of the pumping station. It is marked as a windmill on some later maps and as adjacent to a long building described as a tannery. The tannery was there  1792 - 1876 and the mill may have been a wind pump or maybe used for bark grinding.

 

There are a scattering of other windmills in the Greenwich Borough area.  One is marked on a map  in Mottingham Lane; there is a single reference to ‘a stump windmill’ at Horn Park Farm in 1833. There is a bit more information about a windmill in Harrow Fields –later covered by the Ferrier Estate - which was  blown over in a storm and was relocated in 1836 to Meadowcourt Road in Lee. Nearer to Greenwich it is thought that a windmill may once have stood on the Greenwich side of Blackheath at the north end of West Grove where the southwest corner was once called ‘Windmill Field’.

 

There are many pictures – some by famous artists – of windmills on Blackheath. These were all in what is now the Borough of Lewisham, but very close to the boundary. They were the subject of a very, very detailed article by Leslie Monson in the 1977 Transactions of the Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarian Society.  They were included by Neil Rhind in two volumes of his work on Blackheath and its Environs and more recently by Rob Cummings in his book on windmills in north west Kent and Kentish London.

 

One  - probably the earliest - of the Blackheath windmills stood adjacent to Hollyhedge House in the late 17^th century.  Hollyhedge is the site of the current Territorial Army buildings, on a side road to the east of Wat Tyler road.  It is described as an open post mill and is mentioned in a document of 1689.   It is thought that the mill was built on an encroachment on the Heath and that the house was built later- the mill site being a mound used for a water tank site.  The mill remained there until 1769 when it was moved to a site near Blackheath Vale.

                                                                     

Another early mill was in Morden Hill - which is said to originally been a footpath leading to it.

It was present in 1745 and had been built after 1706 as another open trestle post mill. It was removed around 1777 to be used elsewhere but the miller’s house survived Into the 1830s. It should be noted that there is modern housing in a ‘Windmill Close’ on the south side of Morden Hill.

                                                                                                                                              

So, there were two early windmills, both of which were moved from their original site. Later two mills stood near what is now Talbot Place. They were known as the East Mill and the West Mill and were on encroachments on the Heath, near a site where sand and gravel extraction was active. This was the area now called Blackheath Vale.  Goffers Road on Blackheath was once called Windmill Road and must have run past the two Talbot Place mills. Both mills were the subject of many paintings of the Heath and thus their eventual states of dereliction can be noted. They also seem to have provided focus points for festivities and events on the Heath.

                                                                                

West Mill was on the site of the current ‘Mill House’, which was built in 1836 on the corner of Talbot Place and Goffers Road.  This may have been the Hollyhedge Mill, dragged across the Heath around 1770. It appears to have been demolished in 1835.

 

East Mill stood behind the houses in Duke Humphrey Road, to be built on the edge of what became later the Vicarage garden. It may still have been standing in 1842 but had been was demolished by 1850. It may well have been the mill which previously stood near Morden Hill.

 

Blackheath Vale is now the site of workplaces, housing and a school in what was in the 19^th century a very considerable chalk pit. Both mills stood nearby and as Neil Rhind pointed out there would have been a sheer drop at the back of the West Mill.

 

 

 

Over the past centuries, as the area covered by the Borough of Greenwich was heavily industrialising wind power does not seem to have been used for anything more than a few corn mills.

 

However we should not be looking at the use of wind to raise energy as something old fashioned  and although there seems to be little to do with its infrastructure in Greenwich today we are certainly using energy created by the wind.  Out in the Channel the London Array is said to raise enough energy to fuel 500,000 homes.

 

Some 20 years ago I saw and photographed a very bizarre vessel on the River which I since understand was the Mayflower Resolution which is used for installing wind turbines at sea.  So that image will have to do for Greenwich and modern wind power.