Qualla: Broad Eye Windmill

Broad Eye Windmill: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Broad Eye Windmill: Built from a Shire Hall

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 tight...

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Broad Eye Windmill: The Steam Engine and the Railway

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 vas...

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Broad Eye Windmill: A Hundred Years of Other Lives

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Broad Eye Windmill: Friends and Broadcasters

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, op...

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