What do Paddington 2, the Smiths and Danny Boyle all have in common?
Answer: a ruined Art Deco industrial building, slowly falling to pieces on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock.
London has changed a lot in recent decades. To someone living here even 50 years ago, much of the city would be unrecognisable. And surely few places bear this change quite so obviously as the area around the Royal Victoria Dock – once London’s industrial heartland, now home to the shiny glass of the new City Hall, the Cable Car, ‘immersive’ tourism at the ExCeL and luxury flat after luxury flat.
On the south side of the dock, though, is one reminder of what came before: Millennium Mills, exquisitely derelict in the face of all that corporate modernity.
I couldn’t think of a better building to kick off my new Building of the Week series – where I’ll be looking at a different building with a fascinating history and what it tells us about our wider past – than these ten storeys of cracked concrete and Art Deco ambition, empty since the 1980s and embedded in our popular culture, whether you realise it or not, through TV, film and music.
This is the story of London’s most famous modern ruin.
The Royal Victoria Dock and the flour trade
The Royal Victoria Dock opened in 1855 – the first of three that would transform this stretch of the Thames into the largest enclosed docklands in the world, and cementing East London as an industrial powerhouse.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Royal Victoria Dock had become London’s largest flour milling centre, and the British Empire’s three biggest flour producers all moved in, building large mills on the site within a few years of each other.
These mills would dominate the waterfront for decades, but only one survives, and even that isn’t the original.
The survivor, of course, is Millennium Mills – originally built in 1905 for Vernon & Sons and named after their most famous product – Millennium Flour.
These developments were, of course, deeply connected to the politics of the time. Domestically, they marked a democratisation of certain types of food. White bread had historically been a luxury; mills like this one were making it affordable for the working classes for the first time.
Internationally, the flour industry was deeply tied in with supply chains built on colonialism, oppression and empire.
Much of the wheat flooding into the docks came from America, grown on land recently violently dispossessed from Indigenous communities, or from British colonies like Canada and Australia.
A visible reminder of how tangible improvements at home often came at a very real cost abroad.
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the Silvertown Explosion
The original Millennium Mills building was an industrial machine, able to produce 100 sacks of flour an hour.
But it didn’t last long. On the evening of 19 January 1917, a fire broke out at a nearby chemical works which had been helping produce TNT for the war effort. This resulted in the largest single explosion in London’s history.
73 people were killed. Over 400 were injured. Streets were flattened. Between 60,000 and 70,000 properties were damaged across the wider area. A fireman on the scene described burning grain from the flour mills falling from the sky like “a golden rainstorm.”
It would take decades for this full story to emerge: the explosion took place during the war, and was heavily censored. Neither the factory or location were named, and the government’s own inquiry wasn’t published until the 1950s.
An Art Deco icon emerges from the ashes
The explosion crippled Vernon & Sons financially. In 1920, they were taken over by Spillers Limited.
Spillers rebuilt the mills as the ten-storey Art Deco concrete building we see today, completed in 1933 – the same generation as the Hoover Building and Battersea Power Station.
During the Second World War, the docks were a prime target and Millennium Mills was severely damaged again. After the war it was repaired and extended, which is why alongside 1933, the building has 1953 stamped on its concrete.
Decades of ruin & a pop icon
But honestly, none of this is what makes Millennium Mills so noteworthy. In 1981, the Royal Docks closed and Spillers moved their operation to Tilbury. Millennium Mills fell silent. The site has been derelict ever since.
In those 40-odd years there have been several failed attempts to bring the site back to life, but nothing, until very recently, stuck. Instead, the building became a destination for urban explorers, and filmmakers couldn’t resist it.
Everyone from the Smiths (a perfect visualisation of Morrissey’s brand of romantic decay) to Orbital, Mick Jagger to the Arctic Monkeys – and even Coldplay – have used it in music videos. Danny Boyle used the building for his film Trance, and it featured as a villain’s lair in Paddington 2. And, of course, Ashes to Ashes used the building extensively.
Its semi-ruined state is what makes Millennium Mills so captivating. A stunning Art Deco icon slowly crumbling, still dominating the waterfront in an area that has been rapidly and – dare I say it – somewhat characterlessly transformed around it.
After decades of false starts, the building is now finally being redeveloped by the Silvertown Partnership into homes, workspace, shops and restaurants.
Shockingly, Millennium Mills itself isn’t nationally listed, unlike nearby Silo D, where grain was held before being processed in the mills.
But Millennium Mills is locally listed by Newham Council, and the redevelopment appears to be genuinely conservation led, with the facade and iconic signage retained.
While Battersea Power Station has been lavishly restored, its eastern counterpart has been left to rot for over 40 years. We can only hope that now that Millennium Mills’ time to enter the 21st century has finally come, it doesn’t leave us with a repackaged piece of heritage, stripped of its character and indistinguishable from the glossy docklands real estate all around it.
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