Gainsford End Windmill Gainsford End · Essex · England

Gainsford End Windmill stands at Gainsford End in the parish of Toppesfield. The present tower mill was built in 1869 at a cost of £2,000 and replaced an earlier post mill that had stood on the site since the late eighteenth century. It was a corn mill and became one of the later brick tower mills of north Essex.

The mill was built as a five-storey brick tower mill with a domed cap. It had four patent sails carried on a cast-iron windshaft and was winded by an eight-bladed fantail. Its internal machinery included a brake wheel driving a cast-iron wallower on a 5 inch cast-iron upright shaft. A 6 foot great spur wheel drove three pairs of millstones, two of which were 4 feet in diameter. The tower was about 20 feet in diameter at the base, with walls 2 feet thick, and rose to about 40 feet, or around 50 feet to the top of the cap.

The mill was worked by named millers including Lewis Steward from 1874 to 1898 and Joseph Chaplin in 1902. It later became derelict. By 1960 the cap had gone, and the building was recorded as a disused brick tower. One of its most significant surviving components, the cast-iron windshaft, was removed and installed in Duck End Mill at Finchingfield during restoration in 1958. That windshaft remained there until 1986, when it was removed after a new wooden windshaft was fitted.

Gainsford End Windmill was listed at Grade II on 27 October 1988. It later underwent residential conversion, completed around 2007, with a separate contemporary house connected to the restored tower by a glazed link. The surviving tower now preserves the outward form of a late nineteenth-century Essex tower corn mill, while its history also connects it with the preservation story of Finchingfield Post Mill.