History

Outwood History

Over time we intend to add more and more historic information to this page, but for now we just have a small amount of information and a few links to other pages on this site that contain some interesting historic information.

If you have any thing to add to this page we would love to receive it.

Links to Historic Content

Brief history of Outwood Windmill (see below)

Brief history of the Lloyd Hall

Outwood Cricket Club History

Brief history of Outwood Church

Brief History Of The Outwood Branch of The Royal British Legion

Pictures

 

Outwood’s Milestones
1542	Earliest known reference to Outwood; the Court Roll refers to the restrictions concerning the felling of timber in Outwood
1665	The Post Mill, still in working order, was built
1834	The Baptist Chapel, no longer in use, was built
1869	St John the Baptist Church was built
1870	The creation of the ecclesiastical parish of St John the Baptist
1876	The school was opened – now converted into apartments
1887	Outwood Cricket Club was formed and is still active
1891	The census of that year recorded about 586 residents in Outwood and 140 houses
1930	Outwood Drama Society was formed, now defunct
1936	The village hall was build, called the Lloyd Hall
2000	Outwood Parish Council was created
2001	Census recorded 569 People (309m, 260f), 224 households (Tandridge Census)
2004	Outwood Website relaunched.

 

For more historic information on Outwood please contact the Outwood Local History Society.

Outwood Windmill

Grade I listed Outwood Mill is the oldest working windmill in Britain.  Built in 1665, it is a post mill with patent shutters and when the wind is adequate still grinds corn, nearly 350 years after it first did so.  Its builders are known to have sat on the partially completed roof in order to watch the Great Fire of London glowing in the distance, some 25 miles away.

Outwood is a 'turret' type post mill.  The body, or buck, of a post mill contains the machinery and the whole thing rotates around a central post, hence its name.  Turret-type post mills have a roundhouse built at the base.  Here it is of brick, 6.7m (22') in diameter and 2.75m (9') high.

The mill is 11.89m (39') tall. The buck is clad in tarred horizontal boarding and topped by an ogee-shaped roof.  There is a tail ladder and tailpole and four anticlockwise single shuttered spring sails controlled by elliptical springs.  The internal machinery includes a 2.44m (8') diameter brake wheel with 108 wooden cogs, a tail wheel with cast iron spokes and oak rim with wooden cogs, and two pairs of overdrift stones.

The mill was built for Thomas Budgen in 1665.  It was owned by the Jupp family from 1806 to 1962, when G. & R. Thomas acquired it.  Two replacement sails were fitted in 1931 by the millwright Thomas B. Hunt of Soham for £80.  Another pair of sails was purchased in 1933 from Forncett End, Norfolk.

Milling ceased at Outward in 1949 when a breast beam cracked and the windshaft dropped causing the sails to touch the roundhouse roof.  Temporary repairs were made by millwrights E. Hole & Son of Burgess Hill, followed by extensive repairs completed in 1952.  One of the sail stocks was found to be defective in 1955 and a new pair of spring sails was fitted.  Another stock broke in 1956.  E. Hole & Son fitted a new stock and sail and restored the mill to working order in 1958.

New sails were given to it, in modern times, by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings./span>

At some point during the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries a dark, octagonally-shaped smock mill was built next to the post mill.  This was built as a rival by the brother of the owner of the older post mill, and it was intended that the new mill would supersede the old, but when trade declined the old windmill triumphed and the new smock mill closed instead.  After a period of dereliction, the smock mill finally collapsed in the early 1960s.

Bibliography

Windmills in Surrey and Greater London by A.C. Smith (Stevenage Museum Publications, 1976)

 

For further information, opening times, etc., see www.outwoodwindmill.co.uk