Millennium Mills
Millennium Mills is also a destination for Urban Explorers despite high security, dangers of structural weakness, ten-storey drops and asbestos, and there are many reports and internal photos of the site.
[3] During the early half of the 20th century, the Royal Victoria Dock became an essential part of industrial Britain and London's largest centre of flour milling.
[7] Millennium Flour was aimed at the rising 20th-century masses, proving particularly popular in the mining districts, where it was known to make "beautiful white bread sandwiches".
[7][9] ...from the flour mills, where several hundred girls had been at work, came flying showers of millions of tiny particles of light as though a sweeping storm of sleet had become incandescent.
The Brunner Mond works was about 100 yards east of where Millennium Mills stood, and the adjoining grain silos and flour warehouses were amongst the 17 acres of buildings that the Port of London Authority estimated were affected.
[17] By 2007, a £1.5 billion building scheme had been approved to convert the 24 hectares (59 acres) site into a mixed use development with residential, commercial, leisure and public areas.
[18][19] The scheme was set to deliver 4,900 waterfront homes, with the intention of converting the Mills themselves into 400 luxury loft-style flats called Silvertown Quays.
When the termination notice expired and the funds were unable to be raised the LDA ended their agreements with the SQL and the Silvertown Quays development was officially cancelled.
Despite discussion with SQL's main backer, the Bank of Scotland, and a new plan and revised timetable for the regeneration of the site, the London Development Agency concluded that it could not accept the new proposals.
[22] On 21 April 2015, Newham Council gave planning permission to The Silvertown Partnership for a new £3.5billion redevelopment of the area, including Millennium Mills.
[24] To mark the grant, communities minister Penny Mordaunt MP and the deputy mayor of London for housing, Richard Blakeway, paid a visit to the 62 acre site.
This iconic building will be the centrepiece of a thriving new business district that will create thousands of new jobs and bring prosperity back to the docks.
As of September 2015, the Millennium Mills have been cleared of internal machinery and grain chutes which posed an asbestos risk, though the removed artefacts are planned to be donated to artists to use.
[26] In 1987, British film-maker Derek Jarman released his self-shot avant-garde film The Last of England, which featured Millennium Mills as a key location.
There was only one week of formal shooting for the film which occurred in November at the Royal Docks, an area Jarman described as "miles of desolation with the odd post-modern office building.
[27] British writer and psychogeographer, Iain Sinclair talks about the use of Millennium mills in Derek Jarman's film, describing it as having "been christened by William Blake and delivered by Albert Speer"; the English Romantic poet and Adolf Hitler's chief architect.
"[28] In another piece of writing, Sinclair analyses Jarman as a man who "saw the downriver reaches of Silvertown, with its abandoned flour mills, as a site for dervish dances and the rituals of a punk apocalypse.
"[29] Jean-Michel Jarre had the Millennium Mills painted white as a surface for projection of lighting effects for his 1988 show Destination Docklands.
[34] The mills also appear as the setting for a number of music videos, including "Ask" by The Smiths (1986) filmed by Derek Jarman on the north side of Royal Victoria Dock,[35] "The Box" by Orbital (1996) featuring Tilda Swinton, "Fluorescent Adolescent" by the Arctic Monkeys (2007),[36] "Take Back the City" by Snow Patrol (2008), "Build A Fire" by Lamb (2011), and "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall" by Coldplay (2011).
