Museum Archives - Wharf Life

The world’s largest surviving tidal mill is ongoing as it targets the production of electricity from the Lea

The House Mill at Three Mills in Bromley-By-Bow

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“I just think this plucky building really deserves to survive – it’s been through so much,” said Beverley Charters.

We’ve just ascended an ageing wooden staircase and squeezed through a small wooden portal to pop out onto the roof of the House Mill, a Grade I listed structure that straddles the River Lea in Bromley-By-Bow.

To stand on the duckboards in the v-shaped channel that runs between the roof of the building’s twin peaks is a rare privilege.

It’s not on the official tour for various health and safety reasons, but it does provide a place to locate this extraordinary hub of historic industry in east London.

Beverley points out all the areas and activities that the mill would once have supported, including a vast pig farm with the animals fed on waste products from the site.

Today it’s a sea of regeneration with Sugar House Island and many others, all set to bring new homes and businesses to the area as progress marches on.

Under our feet, however, some 247 years of history await.

Today two mills remain standing at Three Mills although the site has a history of tidal milling that dates back to the Domesday Book in 1086 – the earliest recorded examples of such activity.

Originally Three Mills produced flour, notably for the celebrated bakers of Stratford-Atte-Bowe, with the number of mills dropping to two in the 16th century.

The site later pivoted to grind grain that was used to distil alcohol and the area became a major player in the production of London gin.

Today the House Mill, built in 1776 on foundations dating to 1380, and the Clock Mill, rebuilt in the early 19th century, still stand.

While the latter currently houses the Harris Science Academy East London, the former continues on a journey of restoration and preservation that started in the 1970s when this glorious building nearly became a flat expanse of tarmac.

The House Mill’s Beverley Charters, a trustee, and Geoff Cosson, a volunteer

“It could have been destroyed by bombs during the Second World War like the neighbouring Miller’s House or flattened by developers who wanted to turn it into a car park – but it wasn’t,” said Beverley – a trustee of the House Mill Trust, which looks after the building and who – alongside volunteer Geoff Cosson – shows me round.

“What we ultimately want is a working building that offers all manner of opportunities to educate people so they can see the wheels turning again.

“This is the world’s largest tidal mill, it’s an extraordinary building and it’s our dream to make it fully functioning and sustainable – a place with real purpose.”

Even without the waters of the Lea turning the wheels, the building is remarkable.

Filtering down through its levels – following the route that would have been taken by the grains on their way to the grinding stones and the sacks waiting for the flour on the ground floor – Beverley and Geoff release a steady flow of anecdotes and facts about our surroundings.

Mostly constructed from wood, the place is a baffling maze of hoppers, stores and production floors where the grain would have been sorted, cleaned and fed into the whirling stones whenever the tide was providing the power, day or night.

That force was provided by four massive iron waterwheels, harnessing the green energy of the Lea and distributing it through the building via huge drive shafts.

The overall plan is to restore the House Mill to some degree of working order with the waterwheels spinning once more with the tide, although these will be used to generate electricity to power the building and give it an income, rather than to grind grain.

With much work done internally in the 1990s, including the rebuilding of the bombed out Miller’s House as a cafe, visitor and education centre, a substantial amount of work has already been achieved.

Wooden blanks in the mill for making metal machine parts

But the trust faces big bills to keep operating and fundraising for a challenging project to dam the river, so work can be done on the wheels to bring them back into use.

It’s also having to contend with increasingly frequent flooding of the mill’s ground floor, possibly as a consequence of measures upstream to control the level of the waterways in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which prevents the incoming tide flowing as far up the river.

Nevertheless, there’s a sense of fight and optimism, with the next project aimed at weatherproofing and protecting the rear of the building to match the recently renovated facade. We wanted to complete it pre-lockdown, but it’s finished now and we think it looks rather fabulous,” said Beverley.

“Now we’re somehow going to fundraise for the back and repair some storm damage we’ve had to the roof before returning to the main project of getting the building working again. We hope it will be possible and we think we can do it.”

But why bother expending all this effort to conserve and celebrate a historic building at all?

“I just think buildings like this are fantastic,” said Geoff, a former teacher who became involved with the project after moving back to the Isle Of Dogs from Cyprus and visiting the House Mill with his wife.

“There’s also a degree of connection because both my grandparents were from this area – my grandmother lived in Nairn Street just down the river and got married on Christmas Day at the registrar’s office in Bromley-By-Bow, which is still there.

“I wanted to be involved with something that wasn’t just about ogling things, where there was a bit of history.”

The mill contains examples of machinery used in its operation

Alongside that link to the history of the area, there’s also a major part that the mill can play in east London’s ongoing story.

“We have been in a period of recovery following the pandemic, but we were busy pre-lockdown with weddings, quiz nights, gin tastings and other events,” said Beverley.

“They might not relate to the history of the mill directly but once people are here we smuggle the heritage in.

“What we’ve found is that once people come through the door and see the size of the machinery they just love it and we have lots of stories we can tell them.”

The House Mill Trust is currently seeking funding and volunteers to continue its work.

The building will be open on Sundays in summer for guided tours costing £10 (including a guide book and a hot drink).

The House Mill’s next project is to refurbish its rear wooden facade

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- Jon Massey is co-founder and editorial director of Wharf Life and writes about a wide range of subjects in Canary Wharf, Docklands and east London - contact via jon.massey@wharf-life.com

Exhibition at the London Sugar And Slavery Gallery examines the role played by food in black identity

Aleema Gray is community history curator at Museum Of London Docklands

Walk over the floating green bridge from Canary Wharf to West India Quay, turn left and, just behind a now vacant pedestal, you’ll find the Museum Of London Docklands.

Head up to its London, Sugar And Slavery gallery and, provided you visit before July 17 next year, you’ll find a bright orange corner dedicated to Feeding Black.

The display, which opened to the public this month, examines the role played by food in black entrepreneurship and identity in south-east London.

Focusing on four businesses – Livity Plant Based Cuisine in Croydon, Zeret Kitchen in Camberwell plus Junior’s Caribbean Stall and African Cash And Carry, both in Woolwich – it explores how they act as much more than suppliers of goods and services to their customers, as spaces to talk and express politics, culture and heritage.

Community history curator Aleema Gray said: “One of the things I’m really interested in is looking at alternative knowledge – what it means to represent in terms of curatorial displays, and that was the motivation behind this exhibition.

“It’s about alternative ways of knowing. For instance, we’ve recently had an upswell of looking at black British history. But, when you go into the community, there’s oral history, the things that are left outside academic textbooks. Curators are typically seen as people who conserve this kind of academic knowledge.

“What’s interesting about this project is looking at the ways alternative knowledge can be used to make certain interventions in the role of curator – it sounds wishy-washy, but it is essentially asking how we can include multiple different perspectives and narrative experiences in our displays? I put a call out, basically asking: ‘What are contemporary black experiences?’. Some people said, ‘my kitchen’ or ‘the barber shop’ and one person put forward an idea she had, which she referred to as the ‘black economy’.

“She’d been looking at black-owned food businesses as part of her research, focussed on African Cash And Carry – interviewing people that came in – and discovered these spaces were about more than just commercial gain. They were for politics, culture, sending money back home and buying food. There was even a little restaurant – a multi-dimensional space.

“I wanted to explore that a little bit further, so I took that and thought about what the next step was for this kind of research and put forward a proposal for Feeding Black – which takes the element of looking at not only community spaces, but also interrogating power, because a lot of the conversations when we did the initial oral histories were talking about what it means to be in London today, to survive and thrive, to start a business, the challenges, the setbacks, but also stories about being part of a diaspora.

Junior’s Caribbean Stall in Woolwich features in the exhibition

“Apart from one, all the people featured in the displays were born outside London – one in Ethiopia, one in Jamaica, one in the Congo, one in the Cameroons, so a lot of this is entangled with questions of migration and so on.

“That’s how the initial idea came about, but the area I work in, Curating London is very much a participatory project – we place a particular emphasis on being on the ground – visible outside the museum – and asking what a museum wall is.

“We had to re-jig things a bit because of the restrictions around the pandemic, but essentially the main exhibition deals with four black-owned food businesses, their oral histories and the objects that they put forward reflecting their place. It also looks at different themes of food including health, the different objects you find in kitchens as a place of work but also the nutritional value of ingredients and dishes and we’ve got a recipe wall as well.”

In her role, Aleema has a particular responsibility for the London Sugar And Slavery Gallery in which the exhibition sits.

She said: “Since the gallery opened it has been shelved a little bit, so my responsibility is to try to re-mobilise certain conversations, make some interventions to think about how we develop, and take that gallery a little bit further.

“Feeding Black sits in the wider gallery, because I wanted to do something in response to the ways in which Docklands has been developed as a direct result of the plantation economy.

“For me, food acted as a perfect segue to think about London, Sugar And Slavery, not only in terms of the content of the exhibition, but also the visual design.

“This exhibition is very much about the process as well as the content, as is the wider gallery.

“Feeding Black was about using that space as a vehicle for community engagement.

“It’s also not necessarily a chronological history – it draws on certain themes and it puts forward not necessarily answers, but asks questions about the legacy of this history and how we are all implicated in it. Feeding Black tries to speak to that.

“In the crates under the wall display, for example, you have certain questions, such as: ‘Where does our food come from?’

“It’s very subtle, but it helps people to think about the legacies of migration, enforced or otherwise.”

Aleema, who is currently finishing a PhD on the documentation of a community engaged in the Rastafarian movement in Britain, said it was weird to talk about herself as a curator.

She said: “I didn’t go to museums as a young person because I didn’t see myself or my history reflected in these spaces but something I’m really passionate about is curating history from below – the silent histories, the hidden archives – I’m a historian.

“There’s this idea of what history is in schools – the Romans and the Tudors, for example. I feel there’s a need to show that history is dynamic, it’s a verb, and that started my work to see how we can bridge this gap. This is what I’m doing as a curator and an academic – situating myself as the outsider within.

“The Museum Of London and museums in general are making a strong effort. There’s a lot more work to do but we’re definitely on the right path.”

The museum is free to visit and is currently open from 10am-5pm Wednesday to Sunday.

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Tag: Museum

Bromley-By-Bow: How the House Mill aims to get its waterwheels spinning again

The world’s largest surviving tidal mill is ongoing as it targets the production of electricity from the Lea

Canary Wharf: Feeding Black opens at Museum of London Docklands

Exhibition at the London Sugar And Slavery Gallery examines the role played by food in black identity