DOUGHING, DOUGHING, GONE! INTEREST RISING FAST IN ‘BAKE OFF ’ HOME COMPLETE WITH ITS OWN MILL AND BAKER

Mail on sunday 30 august 2015

Paul Hollywood has declared that the standard of bread- making in the current series of Bake Off is the ‘best yet’. Impressing baking-expert Hollywood is no mean feat, but it turns out that he knows less about his ingredients than you might imagine.

Mandy James, 68, who owns the Grade II listed Redbournbury Mill, remembers Hollywood visiting the watermill as part of his BBC2 series Bread. ‘He was very interested, and he knew a lot about baking,’ she says. ‘But not about milling.’

She adds that Hollywood also did some baking at the mill for the show. ‘There was a bit of “...and here’s one I made earlier”, though.’

Raymond Blanc and the French patissier Eric Lanlard have also visited Redbournbury – which comprises accommodation in the mill house as well as a working mill and a bakery – and Mandy says that Blanc was more knowledgeable about the mill’s processes than Hollywood. 

The property, which is in Hertfordshire and is available for offers in excess of £1,750,000, has also been on The One Show, in a segment featuring food critic Jay Rayner.

The James family, who bought Redbournbury Mill in 1986, are clearly very proud of the mill. There has been a mill at Redbournbury for nearly 1,000 years and it features in the Domesday Book of 1087. And over the years it has been owned by the Abbey of St Albans and the Gorhambury Estate. The mill also opens as a museum two days a week.

But when the Jameses bought the property, the mill was in a sorry state, and had been run by the same family for 150 years.

‘It had no mains electricity and no gas and the woman who lived here, Ivy Hawkins, had a terribly primitive lifestyle,’ Justin James, Mandy’s 43-year-old son says.

Redbournbury is one of Britain’s last working mills and Hawkins was ‘the last lady miller in England’, only moving out of it aged 89 in 1985. ‘She did all the milling herself and all the work we do now with an army of volunteers, she did by herself.’

The mill is run by volunteers but a professional baker runs the bakery.

Milling is in Mandy’s blood and she fell in love with the idea of running one. ‘My grandfather was a miller,’ she says. ‘He had a mill in Hampshire but he lost his arm in the mill.’ But disaster was to befall Mandy’s dream early on, when a fire ripped through the property in 1987. 

‘The fire meant that what we thought was going to be a six-month restoration job has actually taken 30 years,’ Justin says. ‘Almost everything was destroyed in the millhouse apart from the actual mill machinery.’

But nearly three decades later the mill and bakery is thriving. ‘It’s a whole community project now, that’s the lovely thing about it,’ Mandy says. ‘We’ve got a team of volunteers from the neighbouring villages, from St Albans and Harpenden. People spend hours down here, helping out.’

Most of the machinery at the mill, which stands on the River Ver, is Victorian, and all the power for the millstones and auxiliary machinery was provided by the waterwheel until low flows led to the mill being fitted with an engine. The engine now supplies all the electrical power for the mill (and potentially to the millhouse).

‘The mill is now in full working order,’ Justin says. ‘We’ve got an organic farmer neighbouring us and he grows the wheat we use. We mill it here and then sell it in our bakery, so it’s got the lowest possible food miles.

‘We’re open every Saturday morning and we get hundreds of customers coming to get their bread, so it’s going back to what it would have been like hundreds of years ago with that accountability for your food.’

The family are clearly so passionate about the mill, so why are they selling it? ‘We need to downsize and the property needs someone younger who can really come in and develop it now,’ Justin says. ‘Although the bakery is staffed by professionals, the mill is run by volunteers, often people with an engineering background or an interest in history.’

The family learned about the milling process by visiting lots of other mills. Mandy says that every time she saw a road that said Mill Lane, she would head down it.

‘There’s no rocket science to any of it, though,’ Justin says. ‘It’s all big old machinery that we use, all very over-engineered. So it’s very difficult to damage it.’

He adds: ‘Milling uses all of the senses: you rub the flour between your thumb and forefingers to see how fine it is; you’re listening to machinery to make sure it’s running properly but, principally, you’re using your sense of smell because if you put the millstones too close together you smell burnt toast!’

There is a covenant attached to the property stating it must operate as a mill, and the person who lives in the ‘millhouse’ must be the ‘miller’.

The mill house has four bedrooms. Parts of the property date from the 17th century but much of it was rebuilt and extended in 1790.

‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase one of the country’s last working mills and to live in the beautiful house next door,’ Jasper Feilding, of Carter Jonas’s London Country Department, says.

‘The purchaser can enjoy being located in secluded countryside but not at all far from the centre of St Albans.’