Sharnbrook Windmill Sharnbrook · Bedfordshire · England

Sharnbrook Windmill was a small tower mill built of local oolitic limestone. Bedfordshire Archives records that it had three floors and two pairs of four-foot stones on the first floor. The exact date is treated slightly differently by the consulted sources: the Bedfordshire HER records a tower mill built in 1880 to replace an earlier mill dated 1826, while Bedfordshire Archives states that it is believed to have been erected in the 1870s or 1880s and that a postcard of 1878 shows the windmill already in situ.

The mill worked as a corn tower mill, but its active life was short. Bedfordshire Archives states that the era of the windmill was coming to an end and that Sharnbrook Windmill ceased working in 1890. The sails remained in place for a period after working use ended and were taken down in 1920.

Later archive references record postcards and photographs showing the windmill in derelict condition and with damaged sails in the early twentieth century. In 1966 a proposal was made to convert the windmill at Windmill House into an observation and clock tower. In 1967 the contents were stripped out.

During the early 1970s the former mill was converted into an observation tower by Clement Howard, managing director of the Bedford engineering firm C.A.E.C Howard. The Bedfordshire HER records the present condition as a tower mill converted into an ornamental clock. Windmill World similarly records Sharnbrook as a corn tower mill converted to an observation tower.

The surviving structure is therefore a post-working adaptation of a late nineteenth-century tower mill rather than a preserved working mill.