White Roding Windmill White Roding · Essex · England

White Roding Windmill is a five-storey brick tower corn mill on Church Road, White Roding. The site had a long wind-milling history before the surviving tower was built. A post mill had stood there since 1609, and it remained in use until it was destroyed on 1 January 1877, when the main post broke in a gale while the miller had too much cloth spread on the common sails.

The replacement tower mill was built in 1877 by Whitmore's, the Wickham Market millwrights. It is regarded locally as the last tower mill built in Essex. The mill had an ogee cap, four patent sails on a cast-iron windshaft, a six-bladed fantail, and two pairs of underdrift millstones. The brick tower is about 42 feet high, 22 feet in diameter at the base, and 13 feet at curb level. The only major surviving item of machinery recorded inside the mill is the brake wheel, a nine-foot wheel with 115 cogs, as the remaining machinery was removed shortly after the Second World War.

The mill worked by wind until 1926 and then by engine until 1931. The lease expired in 1931 and was not renewed. In 1937 the mill was bought by the actor Michael Redgrave, and it passed to a company in Barrow-in-Furness in 1946. During the 1950s the mill was derelict and was threatened with demolition more than once. It was already protected as a Grade II listed building, having been listed in 1952. In the 1970s millwrights Philip Barrett-Lennard and Vincent Pargeter built a new cap for the tower. White Roding Windmill now survives as a conserved tower mill, retaining its cap and brake wheel but no complete working machinery.