Richard Cookson signed a lease in 1805 with the local squire for a plot of land on the marshes. He called what he proposed to build a windy milne. It was a tower mill, the iron and brick kind, designed to grind wheat and oats into flour and bran. Some of its machinery was already old when he installed it. A mainshaft of Baltic oak, salvaged from another local mill, was reportedly already 150 years old when it took its place inside the new tower. The drying kiln stood beside the mill, smoking away, until the well-to-do houses of the growing town crowded too close and pressured the operation to move the kiln to a side street. Around 1860, the same prestigious residents started calling the mill itself an industrial nuisance. The land around it was levelled and grassed. The mill stood at the centre of a long, narrow green between the houses and the sea, which is exactly where it stands now.

Tower mills have brakes for exactly the reason that became disaster on 2 January 1919. When the wind exceeds a certain threshold, the sails generate more torque than the friction brake can absorb, and what is meant to slow the machinery instead heats it. The fire that gutted Lytham Windmill that day spread quickly through dry timbers and meal dust. Commercial milling had not survived this gale. The hollowed tower remained derelict until 1921, when squire John T. Clifton donated the ruin to Lytham Urban District Council. Restoration in those decades meant a new cap and mock sails. Through the rest of the twentieth century, the rebuilt shell served as a cafe, then headquarters for the Lytham Cruising Club, the Motorboat Club, and the Sea Cadets, and at one point an Electricity Board sub-station hummed inside the ground floor. A working mill became a community shed.

In 1951, the windmill was designated a grade II listed building, which made it harder to demolish but no easier to maintain. The serious restoration arrived in 1989, when Fylde Borough Council took the mill apart and put it back together with proper sails and a small museum inside. The Lytham Heritage Group now runs the interpretive space, explaining the mechanics of flour milling to summer visitors. The plinth that surrounds the base was added later for safety, after the years when people walked closer than they should. Lytham Green opens out around the mill toward the Ribble estuary; on a clear day the Welsh mountains break the southern horizon, and the white tower turns slowly on its repaired axis, no longer grinding anything but turning all the same.