Woodbridge Tide Mill Museum

Woodbridge Tide Mill stands beside the River Deben in East Suffolk. A three-storey wooden building clad in white Suffolk boarding, it has a Gambrel roof and a working water wheel that still grinds wholemeal flour. The mill is a Grade I listed structure, recognised for its early Industrial Revolution machinery. A half-acre reservoir beside the mill shows how the tide powers the wheel. The original seven-acre reservoir is now a marina, linking the mill to the river’s daily rise and fall. The site has been a mill since at least 1170, when an Augustinian priory ran it. Henry VIII took the mill in 1536 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Elizabeth I later granted it to Thomas Seckford, and private owners rebuilt it in the seventeenth century. By the Second World War it was one of the few tide mills still working. The last commercial milling ended in 1957, but Mrs Jean Gardner bought the derelict building in 1968 and restored it. Visitors today see the restored machinery turning once more. A charitable trust runs the mill with volunteers, and a 2011–2012 project fitted a new water wheel. Wholemeal flour is milled regularly and sold on site. The mill’s ground floor displays the wheel and gears, while upper floors hold interpretive displays. Outside, the river and marina frame the white wooden building, a rare survivor of medieval industry still at work.