Winchester City Mill
Anne Aldridge, Property Manager
Not many people have a working mill in the centre of their city. It was a big,
complicated job to bring it back to life. There wasn't any machinery left, just
part of a wheel. Different parts came from different places. By 2005, with brand-new
millstones from Holland, it was working perfectly.
The local community were really involved. They're proud that now we can make
the finest wholemeal flour using simple technology and the power of water, not
fossil fuels. It's attracting 25,000 visitors a year. We're grinding flour every
weekend and selling it to restaurants and to customers in our shop.
We work a lot with schools. Children can use hand-querns to make their own
flour, and then follow a technology trail. In school holidays they come back
with parents or grandparents, sharing memories of baking and harvesting.
There's another side to the mill -the work we're doing with Hampshire Wildlife
Trust. Almost every night otters visit us. We've installed video-cameras to
film them, and volunteers edit the best pictures on to a DVD so visitors in
the daytime can see the otters in action.
There's so much here for people to get engaged in. Lots of holiday activity
for children, with a Hidden Nature Week, workshops on animal tracks, birdbox
building, hands-on milling. And it's volunteers who make it all happen. IT consultants
during the week become expert flour-millers at the weekend.
The key is to be accessible, ready to talk, and to let people get their hands
on things. Grinding flour, baking bread, watching otters, kingfishers, water-voles
and bats - all this is happening right here in the middle of Winchester.
