Museums

Wimbledon Windmill Museum

The mill of 1817 on Wimbledon Common where Baden-Powell wrote part of Scouting for Boys, with the workings of a rare hollow-post mill explained across two floors, free on summer Sundays.

Free

Charles March, a carpenter from Roehampton, took a ninety-nine-year lease on a corner of the Common in 1817 at two shillings a year, on condition that he kept a public corn mill for the neighbourhood, and being a carpenter rather than a millwright he built it his own way: a hollow-post mill of a kind common in Holland and almost unknown here, with the drive to the stones running down through the centre of the post. It stopped in 1864 when Earl Spencer, lord of the manor, set out to enclose the Common and build himself a house on the site; the six-year fight that followed ended in the Act of 1871 that handed the Commons to their own conservators, and the mill, its stones removed, was turned into six cottages. Robert Baden-Powell wrote part of Scouting for Boys in the mill house in 1908. The museum opened on the upper floor in 1976 and took the ground floor too in 1999, when the sails were put back into working order: models of every kind of windmill, the tools of the trade, a cottage room kept as it was in 1870 and a cabinet of Scouting relics. On a few weekends a year the rangers release the brake at two o'clock and the sails turn.

Where

Windmill Road, SW19 5NR

Nearest station

Southfields · 24 min walk

Hours

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 8 September 2026.

Sundays during British Summer Time only; the last day of 2026 is 25 October. Group tours on weekdays by arrangement.

NearbyMuseums

• Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum16 min walk
• Southside House24 min walk
• Museum of Wimbledon24 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Wimbledon CommonOutdoors & Nature12 min walk
• Buddhapadipa TempleSacred London14 min walk
• Cannizaro ParkOutdoors & Nature20 min walk

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