Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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House Mill, Three Mills

The largest tidal mill in the world, of 1776, on an island in the Lea, turned by the river as the tide ran out.

Engines & pumpingOpen days onlyGo inside

Photo by Gordon Joly, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

The Lea's tides drove mills at Three Mills for nine hundred years, and the House Mill of 1776 is the one that survives: four undershot wheels in the race beneath a five-storey timber-framed mill that ground grain for the Bow gin distilleries until 1941, with the machinery and millstones in place and the wheels being restored to turn. The Sunday tours go down to the wheels and up through the floors, and the island around it, with the Clock Mill and the film studios, is one of the more unexpected corners of east London.

Where
Three Mill Lane, E3 3DU
Nearest station
Bromley-by-Bow · 5 min walk

Sundays 11:00–16:00 from April into the autumn; tours at 11:30, 13:30 and 15:00, £10

Closed for the winter; the mill's site says when it reopens.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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