Back to the Grindstone: Thwaite Mills

There is an island between the River Aire and the Aire & Calder Navigation with a working watermill on it. Nineteen acres. Ten minutes from the middle of Leeds. Most people who live here have never set foot on it, and for the last two years nobody could.

Thwaite Mills closed to the public in April 2024. This month it changed hands, and the restoration starts now.

The story

Will Habergham, Terry George, Michael Rothwell and Kirk Allen have taken on the Grade II listed site at Stourton with the intention of putting it back to work. The plan is a working museum, with the mill owner’s cottage becoming a traditional canal-side pub and the old ticket office reopening as a cafe. Beyond that, a beer garden running down to the water, landscaped grounds left open and free for walkers and runners and dog walkers, free family days, and a hope of bringing back the craft fairs and car boots the site used to be known for.

Roughly twelve months of work. No reopening date, and deliberately so.

What made this one worth taking on was the second half of the story. Thwaite Mills has been rescued before. It ran commercially until 1975, when the weir broke and that looked like the end of it. Local volunteers stepped in the following year and kept it alive until it opened as a museum in 1990. It has never once been saved by anybody other than the people who live near it.

So the new owners are relaunching Friends of Thwaite Mills, and they’re asking for help — properly asking, not as a line in a press release. Millwrights. Engineers. Joiners and stonemasons. Archivists. Former staff and volunteers who understand how the water wheels and the machinery actually go back together.

“This isn’t a job for four blokes with a set of keys,” as Terry put it, which is the sort of quote you don’t have to do anything to.

How we’ve approached it

The instinct with a project like this is to go quiet for a year and come back with a ribbon and a photographer. We’ve done the opposite. The restoration is being documented as it happens, in the open, as a diary, mess, setbacks and all — because the whole thing depends on people feeling some ownership of it before the doors open, not after.

An announcement asks you to be pleased. The diary asks you to turn up.

If you know this mill, or you know how a place comes back together, they want to hear from you: thwaitemills.com or @thwaitemills.