It is exactly 400 years since Wimbledon’s first known windmill was erected by a miller called Edward Hall at Tibbett’s Corner in 1613. It was a post mill and would have looked very different from the present day Dutch-style Wimbledon Windmill further to the south (see Heritage story 14 December 2012).

Although new for Wimbledon, the one erected in 1613 was not the first windmill in the wider area. There was one on Barnes Common as far back as 1443 but the last one known to have survived in that location was blown down in a gale in 1780.

How successful Edward Hall’s Wimbledon business turned out to be remains unclear but he proved to have personal failings. Just a year later, in 1614, his own employees conspired to murder him. The mill itself was later moved – probably by a large team of oxen – down the hill to a site on the Thames riverbank near the Watney distillery in Wandsworth. It was still there until around the end of the 18th century.

The Watney family had a long association both with Wimbledon – founder Thomas Watney lived at the Crooked Billet in the 1730s – and the River Wandle where it owned one of the largest of many watermills in operation at the time. Indeed, the Wandle was once one of Europe’s most industrialised rivers with nearly 200 waterwheels between its source and the Thames.

The Watneys’ mill was located on the site of today’s Arndale Centre in Wandsworth. It used a combination of water and steam power to drive over 30 pairs of millstones and produced sufficient flour for some 50,000 people - ten times the local population of the day. However market demand also remained for un-milled wheat rather than this factory-produced flour and to meet it, John Watney applied to the Manor Court in 1799 to build another windmill on Wimbledon Common. It was not to be as he died before making any progress.

A few years later in 1806, miller John Blake Barker was granted permission to build a windmill on half an acre of newly enclosed land at Mitcham Common. His tenancy demanded that he “grind the grist of the inhabitants of Mitcham on two days every week for ever at a fair and reasonable price”. The mill was in place the following year. Although it had a hollow post like the one that would later appear on Wimbledon Common, it too looked rather different, being basically just a large timber building balanced on a central post that turned in the wind.

It was another decade before the Manor Court granted Roehampton carpenter Charles March a plot of land for a public corn mill to serve the Wimbledon community. He had a 99-year lease worth two shillings (ten pence) a year. It was built in 1817 and would have an active life for the next 47 years, supplying the local population with ground corn before closure in 1864 and beginning its subsequent existence as a place of residence and eventually a museum.

Mitcham Windmill too was operating for around half a century. Eventually it was struck by lightning during a powerful storm and lost two of its sails. It deteriorated further until 1905 when it was dismantled, leaving only the round house with its timber post and trestle.

The Wimbledon Society is working with the Wimbledon Guardian to ensure that you, the readers, can share the fascinating discoveries that continue to emerge about our local heritage.

For more information, visit wimbledonsociety.org.uk and www.wimbledonmuseum.org.uk.

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