Three Mills Island were having a festival and open day, so I decided, after a quick lunch at a cafe near the Arcola Theatre, to get the tube to Bromley by Bow - Three Mills Island is only a five minute walk from the station.
There have been mills there since Saxon times, and today the world's biggest tidal mill is still in existence, though no longer working - it was bombed during the War and never repaired and brought back into service. At first, the idea was to knock the whole place, down, but local residents protested and succeeded in keeping waht remained. Today the Mill House is Grade I listed,. while the Clock Mil is Grade II listed, while the almost demolished Miller's House adjoining the Mill House has been reconstructed and is now a cafe and information centre..
I went first to look at the fair on Three Mills Green, which had been organised by Lea Valley, but there wasn't a great deal there, especially for adults. For children there were things like face-painting and constructing bird houses, But it is lovely open space, which I gather is hardly used by the children from the estate nearby.
There was a tour of the Mill House at 3.30 p.m., which I decided to join, and I was glad I did. The guide, Eleanor Booth (or was it broom?) was very informative about the people who worked there and the sort of things the mill handled - in the 19th century it was famous for grinding grain to make gin, which the poor used to dip cloths into and then suck. Apparently most of them were perpetually sozzled, and half the children were born with foetal alcohol syndrome.
We climbed to the top of the mill, saw how the grain was brought up by pulleys and then stacked in huge storage areas, ready to be funnelled down into the huge grinding wheels, which were powered by the tide. A certain amount of work has been done to the building, in order to make it safe, but a lot more still needs to be done when the money becomes available - and in these days, money isn't falling off trees for projects like that.
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