The Hauxton Mill is a classic English watermill

Watermill

A watermill is a structure that uses a water wheel or turbine to drive a mechanical process such as flour, lumber or textile production, or metal shaping .- History :...

 on the old A10 motorway between Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

 and Royston

Royston, Hertfordshire

Royston is a town and civil parish in the District of North Hertfordshire and county of Hertfordshire in England.It is situated on the Greenwich Meridian, which brushes the towns western boundary, and at the northernmost apex of the county on the same latitude of towns such as Milton Keynes and...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

The mill was the last working commercial mill of this type in the area.
Commercial activity ceased at the mill in 1972, when the last Miller (Gerald Maurice Arthur "Moss" Turner) liquidated his civil engineering businesses (G.M.A. Turner & Son Ltd) which operated out of the mill and its grounds. The mill at the time belonged to a local landowner (squire) as part of his estate.

The neighboring site was owned by a chemical pesticide company known as "Pest Control" for many years before being bought by Fisons Agrochem in the late sixties. Fisons was later bought by Schering

Schering

Schering AG was a research-centered German pharmaceutical company. It was founded in 1851 by Ernst Christian Friedrich Schering and merged with Bayer's pharma sector in December 2006. The company's headquarters was in Berlin-Wedding, Germany...

, but while Fisons still owned the plant in the late seventies, the government introduced new laws about chemical plants, which included regulating how close residential and other property could be.
In fact, the original mill house was (is?) part of the office complex for the plant. Because of this legislation, Fisons were obliged to buy out the neighboring properties with residential housing. Sadly this included the mill site because of the newer mill house (approx 1922) and mill cottage (rebuilt 1973).

At first, Fisons rented the mill from the landowner, and used the mill itself for storage. Planning permission to convert the building to various uses was always rejected due to the historic interest. The new mill house was converted to flats, and after another round of legal changes was finally used as an administrative office before falling into disuse in the mid eighties.

The mill was left unattended, with the doors and windows blocked and barred, and gradually fell into a state of disrepair. A grate in front of the mill wheel was removed for now forgotten reasons, and a storm sent a tree crashing into the wooden wheel, effectively ending the operability of the mill around 1980. The grating has since been replaced and the remains of the tree removed.

See also

• Hauxton
  Hauxton
  Hauxton is a small village in Cambridgeshire, England around 5 miles to the south-west of Cambridge.-History:Hauxton has been occupied for well over two thousand years thanks to its position on the River Cam and a ford near Hauxton Mill that has probably been used since the Bronze Age. A bridge was...
  
  Wiki
• Hauxton Mill on Flickr