The newly-formed National Millwrighting Centre is raising funds to support their ambitious project to train new millwrights to look after the nation’s mills. The National Millwrighting Centre will ensure the survival of the nation’s wind and watermills. There is only a handful of expert millwrights left to maintain over 1000 mills. The Centre will establish…
Author: Liz Bartram
Heygates: our adventure into a modern roller flour mill
Last week our Archivist Nathanael, our Chairman Ron and I were given the rare opportunity to explore the Heygates flour mill in Hertfordshire. While we knew the experience would be very different from a traditional windmill or watermill, nothing could have prepared us for what we found there! Heygates is a company with a long…
Workshop for the mill heritage community (featuring Mr Bean)
We were privileged to meet some hard-working people from around the country on Tuesday. The reason? We ran our annual training workshop, “Caring for your Collection”, attended by people working, volunteering and living at mills and who are just as determined to preserve milling heritage as we are! The workshop included sessions covering how to…
We’re looking forward to tomorrow’s workshop!
We’re putting together the final preparations for tomorrow’s training workshop. “Caring for your Collection” is a regular workshop we run for people who have their own mill collections and are looking for advice on how to look after it. These workshops are popular with people working and volunteering at mills and provide those of us…
Be part of the future of Marsh Mill and help to keep the sails turning
Marsh Mill in Thornton, Lancashire, is approaching its 223rd birthday. The Friends of Marsh Mill now wish to move the Mill to the next stage in its development, so that it can continue to remain an important landmark for years to come. The Friends also hope to establish a National Windmill Museum in the future.…
Thank you for making Saturday’s symposium a success!
We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who came to Saturday’s symposium. For those of you who didn’t attend, read on to discover the highlights and to see photos of the accompanying exhibition! We were delighted to host a joint symposium with the SPAB Mills Section, and it was lovely to…
A special visit from the National Archives of Indonesia!
We were delighted to host a visit from the National Archives of Indonesia yesterday. The reason? They are starting to use AtoM for their own cataloguing software to connect all the regional archives throughout their country, and they wanted to hear about how it is used at the Mills Archive. So the work that our…
Rare glimpse of Upminster Windmill suspended in the air
Upminster Windmill’s restoration project is certainly well under way, as these latest photos show! Millwright Willem Dijkstra has started to repair the tower, this includes the brick base forming the ground floor and the wooden smock tower with 4 floors of machinery. Amazingly, Willem, with just one assistant, jacked up the whole smock tower –…
New grant towards “Archives and Air Hangars project”
We are delighted to announce that we have been granted £30,000 by the Millers’ Mutual Association, to transform how we care for our precious milling records. Faced with a funding gap to complete the project, the MMA have kindly stepped in and have agreed to fund the project over 3 years. This project, also partly…
Happy World Chocolate Day!
So apparently it’s World Chocolate Day. Apart from making us crave some chocolate delights here at the Archive, it got us exploring the origins of cocoa grinding. A quick search of our catalogue shows some of the world’s mills that powered cocoa-grinding machinery. They were often used to extract cocoa butter from the pods, which…