Mills

First recorded windmills c1545

Reproduced with permission from the Encyclopaedia of Brighton by Tim Carder, 1990

Please note that this text is an extract from a reference work written in 1990.  As a result, some of the content may not reflect recent research, changes and events.

Brighton has had many windmills over the centuries, but now only two survive and the locations and dates of many others are far from certain. The first known were the two mills that stood on Church Hill (the Dyke Road ridge) and were recorded in a drawing of the town of 1545, but they may not be the two town mills referred to in the Book of Ancient Customs of 1580, one of which was 'utterly decayed'. By the late 1570s another mill was described in the Little Laine near the cliff top to the east of the town, and by the late seventeenth century there were still two town mills plus three mills in the Little Laine. Two mills were known to have been destroyed by the great storm of 1703, and although three mills remained in the Little Laine for most of the eighteenth century, by 1801 a survey listed only two windmills at Brighton. Now only Rottingdean and Waterhall windmills stand within the borough, but Jill Mill at Clayton was removed from Belmont (which was situated in the parish of Hove at that time) in the 1850s.

Any numerical cross-references in the text above refer to resources in the Sources and Bibliography section of the Encyclopaedia of Brighton by Tim Carder.