Wimbledon Windmill: The Hollow-Post Mill That Became a Museum
Walk north across Wimbledon Common, past the golfers and the dog walkers, and a black-and-white tower rises abruptly out of the gorse and birch scrub. This is Wimbledon Windmill, built in 1817 by a Roehampton carpenter named Charles March, and it is a genuine oddity: a hollow-post mill, a construction so unusual in England that the museum inside it describes the building as the only surviving example of its kind used for grinding flour in the country. Its working life was short, its afterlife extraordinary. The mill has been a home for working families, a backdrop to one of the great Victorian battles over public open space, the place where Robert Baden-Powell worked on Scouting for Boys, and, since 1976, a museum devoted to windmills and the people who ran them.
A carpenter's ambition on the common
At the start of the nineteenth century, Wimbledon was still a village on the edge of London, and its common was a working landscape where local people grazed animals, cut firewood and dug gravel. Bread, however, had to come from further afield, and the idea of a mill on the windy plateau of the common made obvious commercial sense. In 1816 Charles March, a carpenter by trade rather than a millwright, obtained permission from the manor to put up a corn mill on the common, and the following year his mill began to turn.
That a carpenter rather than a specialist millwright built the mill probably explains a great deal about its unusual form. March did not copy the standard post mills and tower mills of the English countryside. Instead he produced something closer in spirit to the small hollow-post mills of the Netherlands, adapted and scaled up for grinding grain. The result was idiosyncratic from the very beginning, and later rebuilding made it more unusual still. What visitors see today, an octagonal weatherboarded body on a brick base, reflects substantial nineteenth-century alterations, so that the mill now outwardly resembles a smock mill even though its origins and its name belong to a much rarer type.
How a hollow-post mill works
To understand why enthusiasts make pilgrimages to Wimbledon, it helps to understand what a hollow-post mill actually is. In a classic post mill, the entire wooden body of the mill, machinery and all, balances on a massive upright post and is turned bodily into the wind. The millstones sit up in the rotating body, and everything, grain, flour and miller, must go up and come down again.
A hollow-post mill takes a different approach. The central post is bored hollow, and a vertical drive shaft passes down through it. Only the small cap-like top carrying the sails needs to turn to face the wind; the power is transmitted down through the hollow post to millstones and machinery housed in the fixed structure below. The idea was widely used in the Netherlands, above all for small drainage mills, but it was rarely applied to corn milling in Britain. That is what makes Wimbledon's mill such a prize for anyone interested in milling technology: it preserves the memory of a design that barely gained a foothold in this country, and the museum uses models and diagrams to show exactly how the arrangement worked.
Half a century of grinding, then an abrupt end
The mill ground corn for the people of Wimbledon and the surrounding district for less than fifty years. Contemporary accounts and later histories paint a picture of a modest local business rather than a great industrial concern: a mill serving its neighbourhood, with the miller's family living close by and the common's gravel diggers and cottagers among its customers.
The end came in 1864, and it came for reasons that had nothing to do with wind or flour. Earl Spencer, lord of the manor, announced plans to enclose Wimbledon Common, sell part of it for building and create a new park and manor house on the rest. As part of these upheavals the mill ceased work. Its machinery was largely stripped out, and the building was converted into small cottages housing several families. What had been a working mill became, in effect, a tiny hamlet in a single building, and it remained lived in for roughly a century afterwards.
The fight that saved the common
Lord Spencer's enclosure scheme provoked one of the defining open-space battles of Victorian England. Local residents organised, lawyers were engaged, and the dispute ran for years before Parliament settled it. The Wimbledon and Putney Commons Act of 1871 took the commons out of the lord of the manor's hands and placed them under a board of conservators, charged with keeping them open, unenclosed and unbuilt upon for public recreation.
The windmill sits at the heart of that story. It was the mill's closure and conversion that signalled how quickly the common could change, and after 1871 the conservators became responsible for the building itself. Money was raised by public subscription in the 1890s to repair the by-then dilapidated structure, and it was during this and later campaigns of repair that the mill acquired much of its present outward appearance. Without the 1871 Act there would very likely be no common and no mill to visit today; the two survivals are inseparable.
Baden-Powell and a famous book
The mill's most celebrated literary connection arrived in the Edwardian era. Robert Baden-Powell, the soldier who became founder of the Scout movement, stayed at the Mill House beside the windmill, and in 1908 he wrote parts of Scouting for Boys there. The book went on to become one of the best-selling titles of the twentieth century and launched a movement that now counts members in the tens of millions worldwide.
The museum marks the connection, and scouting groups remain regular visitors. It is a pleasing thought that a building put up to grind flour for a Surrey village ended up supplying a very different kind of nourishment, and the common outside, with its woods, ponds and open horizons, is exactly the sort of landscape Baden-Powell wanted young people to learn to read.
From cottages to museum
By the twentieth century the mill was a listed building, protected for its architectural and historic interest, but it was still essentially a converted dwelling. The transformation into a museum came in 1976, when the Wimbledon Windmill Museum opened its doors. Run by volunteers and supported by a charitable trust, it tells the story of windmills and windmilling across Britain, with scale models of the main mill types, original machinery, millwrights' and carpenters' tools, and hands-on displays where children can try grinding grain into flour.
Restoration has continued in stages ever since, including a major campaign at the end of the 1990s that returned sails to the mill and renewed much of its fabric. Today the museum opens to visitors on weekends and public holidays through the warmer months, and the mill, freshly painted and complete with sails, is once again the landmark of the common, visible across the fairways and heathland just as it was two centuries ago. The Windmill car park beside it is one of the busiest gateways onto the common, and the tearoom next door does a brisk trade with walkers and cyclists.
Explore on the map
Wimbledon Windmill is a rewarding half-day visit in its own right, and an even better one combined with a long walk across the common to Putney Heath or down to the Wimbledon village. You can find its exact location, along with hundreds of other surviving mills across England and the rest of the world, on our interactive map. Zoom in on south-west London to plan your route, or browse outward and discover how many other unusual mill types are waiting within reach of the capital.