Thwaite Mills sold: historic Leeds watermill to reopen as museum, pub and cafe

There are not many places in Leeds where you can stand on an island. Thwaite Mills sits on one, wedged between the River Aire and the Aire & Calder Navigation, and for a good long while it was among the last working watermills in Britain that you could walk into and watch turn.

Then, in April 2024, it stopped. Leeds City Council, facing the kind of budget arithmetic that has been closing things all over the country, gave up its lease and the museum shut its doors. Two summers have passed with the wheels still.

They’re about to start again.

Four new owners, Will Habergham, Terry George, Michael Rothwell and Kirk Allen, have taken on the site and begin a full restoration this week. The plan is to bring the mill back as a working museum, with a pub and cafe, canal-side seating, and landscaped grounds free for anyone who wants to walk, run or take the dog round them. The work is expected to take about twelve months. No reopening date has been set, which is either frustrating or reassuring depending on how many over-promised heritage projects you’ve watched go quiet.

What’s notable is how they say they want to do it.

“Thwaite Mills was saved by its community once before, and it’ll be brought back by its community now,” says Will Habergham. “We’re not going to disappear for a year and come back with a ribbon to cut. We want people watching it happen, turning up, and telling us what they want this place to be.”

That first bit is not a figure of speech. The mill was built between 1823 and 1825, worked first as a flax mill, later ground whiting and made paint, and stayed commercially operational right up to 1975, a genuinely startling run until a broken weir threatened the whole thing. What saved it was local people. Volunteers stepped in the following year, and after a long restoration it opened as a museum in 1990. Almost everything anyone has enjoyed at Thwaite Mills in the last thirty-five years exists because a group of Leeds residents in the seventies decided a derelict mill was worth the bother.

So the new owners are relaunching Friends of Thwaite Mills, the supporters’ group, and opening it to anyone, including former members of the original Thwaite Mills Society, who presumably have some thoughts. Members get regular updates, invitations to volunteer days, and a hand in shaping what the site becomes. The restoration is being documented as it goes through a social media diary, rather than sealed off behind hoardings and unveiled at the end.

Beyond the museum, pub and cafe, the early wishlist includes a programme of free family events and the possible return of the craft fairs and car boot sales the site used to be known for. Further out, they’re talking about weddings, small music events and a canal-side beer garden.

It’s an ambitious list for a Grade II listed industrial site, and twelve months is not long. But the honest version — no date, no ribbon, come and watch, is a more encouraging noise than most heritage announcements make.

If you want in, you can sign up as a Friend of Thwaite Mills and follow the restoration diary at thwaitemills.com, or on social media at @thwaitemills.