South Ockendon Windmill South Ockendon · Essex · England

South Ockendon Windmill was a smock corn mill built in the 1820s. Although 1829 is often quoted, the mill was already shown on Greenwoods' map of 1825, placing it within the early nineteenth-century expansion of wind-powered corn milling in the parish. The mill was a substantial structure, with a three-storey, eight-sided smock body standing on a two-storey base. It carried four patent sails on a cast-iron windshaft and was turned to wind by an eight-bladed fantail.

The site was technically distinctive because it combined wind milling with water-powered milling. A waterwheel drove a separate pair of stones in the base, alongside the wind-driven machinery. The waterwheel may have formed part of the mill from the beginning, and it was certainly recorded by 1845. The windmill itself drove three pairs of stones, making the site a more complex milling installation than a simple village corn mill.

The mill suffered lightning damage in June 1853. By 1912, a steam engine had been installed, reflecting the wider shift from reliance on wind power to auxiliary power in late working corn mills. South Ockendon Windmill ceased working in 1923. It remained standing after the end of its milling life, but its fabric deteriorated and the mill finally collapsed on 2 November 1977. The collapsed structure was taken into store at South Woodham Ferrers by Vincent Pargeter, the millwright to Essex County Council. A proposal to restore and display some of the surviving remains at South Ockendon was shelved in 1994. In 2005, some of the machinery was identified for possible reuse in the restoration of Halvergate Windmill in Norfolk. The South Ockendon site is therefore now chiefly a former windmill site, its windmill history represented by documentary records and stored surviving material rather than an above-ground mill structure.