Wind Engines in Britain 🌍

Amberley working Museum, near Arundel, West Sussex

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Postcode: BN18 9LT

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wind engine by Duke & Ockenden of Littlehampton

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Calbourne watermill, Isle of Wight

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Charterhouse monastery, Horsham, Sussex

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Éolienne Bollée No.1 - substantially complete; restoration under consideration

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Crux Easton, Hampshire #1777

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NGR: SU427564

(51.30442,-1.3891)

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Wind engine by John Wallis Titt - magnificently restored in 2002

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Entry in Mills Archive database - #1777

Crux Easton wind engine [2011-10-23]

Crux Easton Wind Engine [2004-04-25]

The Wind Engine [2006-10-21]

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Heritage Lottery Fund - £202600 : 03 Aug 1999 : Crux Easton Wind Engine Restoration

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Wind Engine And Former Mill House At Su 4268 5632

Ashmansworth, Basingstoke And Deane, Hampshire

30 Mar 2003 - Photograph (Digital)

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Halstead House Farm, Halstead, Tilton-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire

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Postcode: LE7 9DJ

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19th Century wind engine

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Old Kiln Museum, Tilford, Farnham, Surrey

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hybrid wind engine, consisting of a Climax mechanism on a Duke & Ockenden tower

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The Bob Morse collection, Repps, Norfolk

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a collection of restored wind engines

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Historical locations

Bury St Edmunds

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John Wallis Titt wind engine

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Chilworth Friary, Killarney, Ireland

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Duke & Ockenden

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Creech St Michael, Somerset

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Halladay's patent design of 1854, as manufactured by Bury and Pollard, Pollard Jephson and Co., Owens and Co. and others. The last examples to survive complete were Angmering (now gone) and Iwade (now restored by Bob Morse). Halstead House Farm, Leicestershire, partially surviving, was another one of the same type.

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Hawkinge, Kent

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Hinton Charterhouse, Avon

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John Wallis Titt wind engine

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Marchwood Yacht Club, Southampton

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Postcode: SO40 4UX

John Wallis Titt wind engine - purchased 1873 for £155, now long since disappeared

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Mow Cop, Staffordshire

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John Wallis Titt wind engine

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The UK does not have the wide open prairies to be found in the USA, Australia, or South Africa, and as such did not have huge quantities of the metal windpumps which these countries tend to associate with the word "windmill".

In the UK, these machines are generally called "wind engines", to distinguish them from our windmills which (predominantly) grind grain.

Wind engines have 4 main distinguishing features:

a tower which is empty of machinery, but just serves to raise the wind catching mechanism into the wind
fairly small power output
a simple design suited to mass production
an annular sail

Manufacturers

John Wallis Titt

The wind engines made by John Wallis Titt were some of the finest British made wind engines.

[history] [The company today] [history (earlier location)] [company archives] [Simplex engine]

Duke & Ockenden of Littlehampton

Duke & Ockenden, commonly known as DANDO, produced wind engines from at least 1869-1914. They still exist, but now are mostly concerned with specialist drilling for water etc.

[company history] [company archives]

Other links

British Wind Engine manufacturers
Windpumps on the Kent and East Sussex Light Railway
Éolienne Bollée a French manufacturer

Bibliography

Bibliotheca Molinologica irregular publications of TIMS.
- Volume 3. J. Kenneth Major (ed.): The Windmills of John Wallis Titt. 37 pp. (1977).
- Volume 8. J. Kenneth Major; Gaucheron André: The Éoliènne Bolée. 66 pp. (1985).
Rolt Memorial Lecture, 1990 'Wind Engines' (J.K. Major), AIA Industrial Archaeology Review vol XIV p55 onwards
The Éolienne Bollée at St. Hugh's Monastery, Cowfold. Nick Kelly, and Ron Martin (1999). Newsl Sussex Ind Archaeol Soc, 102, page 2
The Competitive Testing of Wind Engines, J. Kenneth Major, TIMS 10th International Symposium on Molinology, 2000
Wind Engines, Suffolk Mills Group newsletter No 74, May 1999 p12-13
Barn-Top Mills: A study of the agricultural wind engine, Gareth Hughes, Proceedings of the Fourteenth Mill Research Conference 1996 ISBN 0 9509758 9 3.
The Smaller English Windpump, Gareth Hughes, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Mill Research Conference ISBN 0 9530049 1 0.

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Last updated 16/09/2025

Text and images © Mark Berry, 1997-2025 -