Long grind of restoring mill

Volunteers trying to restore an 18th century windmill realised they were in for a long job when it took the local council five months just to make the building safe enough for them to get inside to see what needed to be done. But even they never expected that it would take them another 10 years to finally get it working.

As the five gigantic sails began to slowly turn and York’s Holgate Mill prepares to grind its first flour, Bob Anderton admitted: “If someone had told me back then that it would take this long I think I might have gone off to do something else.

“But I am glad we stuck at it,” said Bob, chairman of the Holgate Mill Preservation Society.

“It has been a lot of hard work but seeing the mill with the sails back on and looking as good as new has made it all worthwhile. There have been times down the years when I thought it might never happen.

“We have a committee of 15 of us and I think that at some time or another every one of us has got dispirited and dejected but luckily never all at once. There has always been someone on hand to keep you going.”

It is thought the mill was built in 1770 in what were then open fields overlooking the city. Today, it perches incongruously on a traffic island in the middle of a housing estate, a site thought to make it unique in Britain.

“It is quite a surreal sight as you drive up the road because windmills are normally out in the fields in fairly isolated locations,” said Bob.

“But I think its position may helped to save it. People just love it.

“A lot of our members are local residents. After we started, people would come up and tell us they remembered the mill working and it was wonderful to see it being restored. After that has happened a hundred times you become pretty convinced you are doing the right thing.

“There is something romantic about a windmill. They were the workhorses of the food industry for centuries and every town and village needed one to feed its people. There may be mixed views about what the Big Wheel in the city centre has done to the skyline.

“But everyone I have spoken to had said that the mill is a welcome addition.”

Bob himself lives just down the road from the mill and got involved with the restoration after his children told him bits were falling off the building. He said: “I looked at it and thought this is an 18th century building and York is famed for its history and heritage. We ought to be doing something to save it.”

It was not that the first time a rescue had been attempted. Holgate was a working windmill until 1930 when storms damaged the sails and they had to be taken down.

An electric motor was installed and kept the grindstones turning for three more years.

In 1938, the last owner, Eliza Gutch, sold it to the city council for £100 on the proviso that it would be preserved. But Adolf Hitler had other ideas and before work could start the Second World War broke out and the restoration was shelved.

A local enthusiast, David Lodge, tried for many years to start a restoration campaign but found it impossible to raise enough money. Finally, however, with the country looking for showpiece projects to mark the Millennium, a local woman, Christine Bramwell, suggested the renovation.

“It was an idea whose time had finally come,” said Bob. “There was money available then that was never there for David Lodge and people were looking for projects to fund. I suspect that if we were starting now it might be impossible again. The timing was incredibly lucky.

“When we started we thought rather naively that it would be easy.

“We thought we would just come up with a scheme, apply to the National Lottery, get £400,000 and restore the mill.

“But it turned out to be not quite as simple as that.”

The first Lottery bid proved to be just the first round in a decade of form filling, applying for grant after grant to carry out work which eventually cost £500,000.

The first application ended in disappointment when Lottery fund officials said they might provide half the cost of a slimmed down scheme – with no sails. But the society was determined to bring the mill back to full working order and bravely turned down the money.

The very night that news was made public, a local businessman telephoned Bob to offer £25,000, to get them started on the long slog of pulling together money from a patchwork of sources ranging from the city council and York businesses to public donations.

“The Lottery decision was a real blow but that call made us think that with that kind of public support we really could do it after all,” he said.

The lifesaver, however, proved to be the Landfill Tax Fund, which redistributes money that is charged for dumping industrial waste to charities and projects run by communities with a landfill site near them.

Over the years, it provided a string of grants which eventually added up to almost £200,000.

A welcome bonus came when the mill won £45,000 on the television programme The People’s Millions on which viewers vote for the most popular project.

But if raising money was a long job, the actual building work seemed to be almost as tortuous. Because of its specialist nature the volunteers could do very little of it themselves.

Fortunately the city council could supply craftsmen who were used to working on historic buildings to look after the fabric of the tower. But much of the internal work and the fitting of the sails required a trained millwright.

“Unfortunately, they are in great demand. Our millwright has done a great job at Holgate but he would often get called away, sometimes for months, to deal with an emergency where perhaps another mill was losing a sail and needed urgent repairs.

“It all made for a long job but we are hoping to start milling flour very soon and to hold our first open day in the working mill this Easter.”

It may have taken 10 times longer to restore than it first took to build but York finally has its only mill back, making it one of only two in Yorkshire – the other is at Skidby near Hull.

Details of open days are available from www.holgatewindmill.orgwww.holgatewindmill.orgwww.holgatewindmill.orgwww.holgatewindmill.org or telephoning 01904 331402 or 01904 795851.