Here’s another round up of mills featured in the news over the past few weeks. Wheat field. Photo: Sue Watts As we mentioned in our previous blog, the impact of the pandemic on mills has been significant, with flour still in short supply and many smaller and traditional mills working overtime to meet demand. In spite of…
Tag: Windmills
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Smugglers’ Mills and Nefarious Thrills
Throughout the ages, the role of the miller has been subject to all sorts of stories and stereotypes: millers have been slandered, satirised, respected and romanticised all in equal measure. Langstone Mill, Havant. Photo: Ashok Vaidya Oft-times in literature, the miller has been the recipient of a similar treatment to smugglers and pirates, his contemporary…
Across the pond with Rex Wailes: Home again
The last entry in our series of blogs about Rex Wailes’ 1929 trip to the USA and Canada. 1929 press cutting from Rex’s files, showing Canadian landscape Unfortunately the last part of Rex’s diary is missing, so his account of his time in Canada is lost. Correspondence from the collection fills in some of the…
Help save the Rex Wailes Collection
Today we are launching our campaign to raise funds to help preserve and make available the Rex Wailes Collection. Read on to find out more about this significant collection and how you can help to conserve and make the gems in his collection publicly accessible. We received the Rex Wailes Collection after long-term talks with…
Volunteer Spotlight: Albury Park Paper Mill and its Forged Assignats
When I’m looking through articles in the Archive, I’m always fascinated in discovering how mills played a part in a wider, often unrelated area of history and their potential political impacts worldwide. One example can be seen in the records of Albury Park Paper Mill, in Surrey. In 1790, Charles Ball, a papermaker from Guildford…
The Mills Archive receives a nationally important collection from the Science Museum
The Mills Archive Trust is pleased to announce that it has received one of the most important mill collections of the 20th century from the Science Museum. The material was assembled over decades by the late Rex Wailes OBE, who was an engineer and the leading consultant for the repair of windmills. Rex’s passion took…
Visiting our Heritage Partner, Wimbledon Windmill!
Last Friday, Liz, Mildred and I had a delightful visit to Wimbledon Windmill, one of the Mills Archive’s Heritage Partners. On our arrival we were greeted by a friendly bunch of trustees and volunteers who help to look after the mill, headed by their Chairman, Asif Malik, and their curator Norman Plastow, a mill enthusiast…
National Mills Weekend 2019 – report and pictures!
The sun was shining and the weather was warm last weekend: the perfect weather to celebrate National Mills Weekend! A festival of open-house mills that takes place across the UK every May, National Mills Weekend is run by the SPAB Mills Section, the UK’s national organisation devoted to protecting and promoting traditional windmills and watermills.…
Gems of the Archive: The Women Who Mill Alone
In recognition of International Women’s Day on 8th March, in this week’s blog we are showing our appreciation for women in milling by featuring two formidable female millers. Milling: a man’s job in a man’s world, or so it certainly was in the first half of the 20th century. As a profession dating back thousands…
Heage Windmill Goes to Bed for the Winter
With the onset of November, some chilly frosty mornings and the dark nights creeping in, a lot of us are starting to feel like hedgehogs have been getting it right all along: it really is time to curl up somewhere warm and dry and hibernate until spring! Heage Windmill Society in Derbyshire agrees, and last…