brixton windmill

The industrial revolution radically changed people’s way of life forever. Using the Brixton Windmill as a starting point, pupils will find out about how wind-power was used in Lambeth and how it was superseded by the invention of the steam-powered engine. Steam-powered mills symbolised progress as well as the loss of traditional ways of production. Come to this workshop and find out about how the change, from an agrarian to an industrial society, caused a riot here in south London – and inspired the English poet and resident of Lambeth, William Blake, to write his most famous and seminal composition ‘Jerusalem'.

Singing and reciting poetry
Tour of the windmill
Handling wheat, flour and bread
Role-play
Mock demonstration/discussion
Creative activity: to make a placard for the mock demonstration

Level: KS3 - Y7 and Y8

Duration: 2 hours

Cost: £60 (Lambeth schools); £120 (non-Lambeth schools)

National Curriculum links: English and History

Pupils will:

• Increase their knowledge and understanding of how industrialisation changed the local area in the 18th and 19th century; and how windmills were the most powerful machines of their age until the first commercially successful steam engine was built in 1712.
• Learn about the inventors who designed and built the most important technological advances of the 18th century: Thomas Newcomen (designed the first steam engine for pumping water); James Watt (developed Newcomen’s engine to burn 75% less coal); Samuel Wyatt (built the first rotary steam-powered flour mill that used Watt’s invention).
• Understand why people were threatened by industrial change and how it affected their jobs and income.
• Find out about the protest movements of the 18th and 19th century.
• Extend their range of historical vocabulary: open fields, rotation, enclosure, albion, luddites, Napoleonic, industrialisation, capitalism, factories, bread riots, water-power, steam-power, mill, cap, millstone, agrarian, horsepower, bushel, mechanisation and urbanisation
• Identify different parts of the windmill: cap, common sail, patent sail, centrifugal governor, provender mill and sack hoist.

Extract from Jerusalem by William Blake