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Carnival procession will celebrate restoration of Regency mill now poised to grind home-grown barley once more
Halfway up Brixton Hill, in a small park hidden away behind terraces of tall Victorian houses, one of the most startling historic buildings in London has sprouted gleaming white sails.
Brixton Windmill, now restored, is ready to start grinding flour again, as soon as the wheat and barley being planted around it by local volunteers is ready for harvest.
"It's a joy to see it, it's just so beautiful," Annick Alet said, straightening up for a moment from the back-breaking work of picking stones from the new field.
On 2 May there will be singing and dancing as a carnival procession from the centre of Brixton heads towards the mill. It will be the first time many people learn of the mill's existence.
Built in 1816, and run until 1934 by generations of the Ashby family, the south London mill was a sad wreck when Florence Nosegby, a local councillor who was brought up on an estate nearby, first saw it. Many of the hundreds of residents who joined the campaign to save it, raising thousands of pounds and donating years of work, lived a few streets away but had never heard about the building.
"It was so sad when I first saw it 13 years ago," said Richard Santhini, an actor, vice-chair of the Friends of Windmill Gardens, and now a trained miller. The park had been a no-go area after dusk, the mill vandalised and littered with drug users' needles. "I thought, we have to bring this wonderful treasure back to life," he said.
The structure is the last survivor of a small regiment of mills that once stood in open countryside on the hills of Lambeth, producing food for London. Even by the 1860s the city had crept so far up the hill there was no longer enough wind to turn the sails; the Ashbys installed first steam and then gas power to keep the mill grinding until 1934.
Its importance was recognised as early as 1951 with a Grade II* listing, but its inexorable decline continued. It passed into the ownership of London county council and then Lambeth council.
In the 1960s, Carmela Zucconi, who owns the flower stall outside the station, climbed the mill's narrow winding staircase with her excited twin sons; she recalls, too, the little buildings and shops that surrounded it. By the 1970s the miller's cottage and outbuildings were flattened, and the building was judged too dangerous for the public, though one local man remembered hiding out there from the police.
By the 1990s the mill had taken up what looked like a permanent place on the Buildings at Risk register, until the Friends of Windmill Gardens were founded and took up the cause.
Despite ominous cracks in the walls, and the fact that the building turned out to have no foundations, being built straight on to the London clay, the mill proved surprisingly sound structurally. Most of the machinery and millstones, much of the woodwork, and the timber cap that rotates to bring the sails into the wind, are the restored originals.
The small provender mill the Ashbys added is ready to run, now powered by electricity, but Santhini is determined to continue until the wind-powered 1.5-tonne millstones are also working again.
The restoration cost just under £600,000, including help of £400,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £55,000 from the council.
"It's a living part of our history," Santhini said. "If we lose buildings like this, we lose something of ourselves as human beings."
Brixton's windmill, built in 1816, was still grinding corn in 1934 though powered by gas not sails.
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