Thornton Windmill As It Was

This is Thornton Windmill taken in 1984 before the craft village and Tavern At The Mill pub restaurant were built. Thornton is reached by heading inland from Cleveleys, near Blackpool. The area around the mill at that time was just scrubland and a high concrete fence surrounded the back of the mill. The photo was taken on a 2¼" square colour transparency or colour slide, on a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera. I've currently no way of scanning such large transparencies so this was scanned from the 1985 Blackpool Gazette calendar in which it appeared.⁽¹⁾ This was my first calendar publication. The following year I had not only the front cover of the calendar but another two or three shots inside also. The front cover was shown on a previous posting.

The windmill is the tallest one in the Fylde (the larger area including Lytham, St Annes, Blackpool, Cleveleys, Poulton and Singleton). There are around half a dozen windmills still standing in the Fylde with another two "over Wyre". At one time though the sails of around 40 mills could be seen from the top of Blackpool Tower. Built in 1794, by the 1920s the first two floors of Thornton Mill had been converted into tea rooms, run by the Misses Barter and Baldwin who advertised:

The Ideal Place for Motorists
DAINTY TEAS, LIGHT LUNCHEONS
Rooms let for picnic, Wedding and
other parties. Parking Ground.

(1) Having subsequently bought a scanner capable of scanning large transparencies, the photographs here have been re-scanned and updated as part of a project begun in 2019 to bring all of my Blackpool entries up to my current standard.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index