Stafford was hungry. By the 1790s the town's three water mills could grind plenty of flour, but most of it was being barged down the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal to Birmingham, where the prices were higher and the millers had no reason to feed the people next door. The corn laws kept grain expensive, and the poor of Stafford were going without bread. The Broad Eye Windmill was an answer. The town set aside allotment land beside the River Sow, scavenged stone from the early Shire Hall that was being pulled down, and in 1796 began building a windmill that would stand sixty-three feet high. When it was finished in the early 1800s, it was the tallest windmill in the Midlands.
The site itself shaped the project. Broad Eye sits in one of the lowest-lying parts of Stafford borough, close enough to the River Sow that the wind funnels along the valley and across the marshland. The brick tower rose from a base of reused stone, the seven floors stacked tightly above an octagonal footprint. Only the upper four floors held grinding machinery; the lower floors were workshops and storage. The original cap was conical, capped by a fantail that turned the sails into the wind. For most of its first thirty years, the mill ground bread flour at a price the town could afford. It was civic infrastructure as much as a private business, a reminder that the answer to a market failure was sometimes a single very tall building.
In 1835 the owners installed a steam engine on the lower floors to keep production going when the wind dropped. It was a sound idea that arrived just slightly too late. The Grand Junction Railway reached Stafford in 1837, and with it came cheap flour from elsewhere, milled in vast steam-driven roller mills closer to the wheat fields. The Broad Eye mill, built for stone-ground flour and a local market, could not compete on price or on the finer white flours that Victorian bakers increasingly demanded. The sails kept turning into the 1890s out of habit and stubbornness. In 1896 the operation finally ended, and in 1897 the sails and winding gear were taken down. The tower was left a tower, with nothing left to turn.
What follows is the part of a windmill's life that nobody plans for. In 1919 the ground floor was converted into a shop. From the early 1920s until 1931 it traded as a butcher's. American troops billeted near Stafford during the Second World War used the lower floors as a wartime store, and after the war the building drifted into dereliction, its windows boarded and the brick weathering through unrepaired pointing. It might have come down. In 1951, instead, it was given Grade II listed status, and a slow consensus formed that this odd dark cylinder beside the river was worth keeping. The actor and historian Tony Robinson became patron of the restoration effort; he is best known to British audiences as Baldrick in the Blackadder comedies and as the presenter of Time Team.
The Friends of Broad Eye Windmill formed in 1966 to look after the building and restore it as a heritage and education centre. Their work has been incremental rather than dramatic: replacing rotted oak beams a section at a time, repairing joists and floorboards floor by floor, opening up the ground floor and basement to visitors while the upper storeys wait their turn. Inside are photographs of the windmill's past lives, the butcher's shop and the storehouse and the long dereliction, alongside artefacts from Stafford's industrial age. In 2016, the local community radio station Windmill Broadcasting moved in and began broadcasting from the building. The Friends and the broadcasters share the space and the cause. Open days through the summer raise the funds the building still needs. The interior is unfinished, which is also a way of saying it is still being saved.
52.81 N, 2.12 W, beside the River Sow in Stafford, Staffordshire. From 1,500 to 2,500 feet AGL the windmill reads as a dark stub of brick on the low ground just west of the town centre, easily picked out against the river and the surrounding parkland. Look for the conspicuous absence of sails on a tall conical tower. Nearby airports: EGBE Coventry to the south-east, EGNX East Midlands to the east, EGCC Manchester to the north.