Paul Kemp

The Arrival

Paul’s van pulled in at ten thirty. He stepped out and was exactly as I had imagined a millwright would be, though I could not have told you exactly why until I saw him. There was a solidity to him, an unhurried ease. He beamed at us with a wide, generous smile, shook my hand, and said he was going to have a cup of tea and change into his work clothes and then we could begin.

It was a small moment but it set the tone for everything that followed. This was a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, in his own knowledge, in his own time.

Then he began.

The Work

He climbed the mill first, working at the brake mechanism, pulling at the chain to release it. The sound of it carried across the marsh. I was below, shooting upward, and Bhavani was beside me filming, capturing me capturing him, the layers of documentation folding over each other.

After a while Paul came back down and then did something I had not expected: he invited me up.

We climbed together through the interior of the mill and Paul talked as we went, explaining everything with the patience of someone who has long since stopped assuming people already know. The windshaft sits at fifteen degrees, he told me, pointing to where the weight falls. Here is how the brake engages. Here is what happens when the wind shifts. Here is where this mill differs from the others along the Broads.

He oiled components as he talked, greasing joints and checking fittings, his hands moving with the kind of automatic knowledge that only comes from decades of the same work. I was shooting constantly, the Leica and the Fujifilm alternating, trying to hold both the man and the machine in the same frame, trying not to let the photography overtake the listening.

The mill had been fully refurbished by its owners. New sails, new timber, new components throughout - a two-year project involving a team of specialist craftspeople. Paul led on the gearing and metalwork and was responsible for getting the mill running again. He mentioned his part without ceremony.

Two years. He said it the way you might mention that a job took a long afternoon.

The Place

Bhavani and I had left London before eight and driven two and a half hours north into Norfolk, the flat landscape opening up around us as the city fell away. We pulled into Toft Monks just after ten, fifteen minutes before Paul was due to arrive. The mill stood at the edge of the Broads, the sails still, the sky wide and pale above the marshes.

I took a few frames to settle myself, walked the perimeter, worked out where I wanted to be standing when things began. You are learning a place before you have to share your attention.

The Teaching

What struck me most was not Paul’s skill with the machinery but his willingness to explain it. Not lecturing. Not performing. Just telling you what he knows, steadily and clearly, because the knowledge matters and someone ought to hear it.

He pointed to joints and fittings as he spoke, his hands landing on each component with the certainty of someone who has touched it a thousand times. The windshaft angle. The brake engagement. The way the cap tracks the wind. Each explanation was grounded in the specific - this mill, this timber, this fitting - and yet it built into something larger. A picture of how these machines work as systems, every part dependent on every other.

The Portrait

Towards the end of the session I put down the Leica and brought out the Bronica. The pace changed. Fewer frames, more stillness, more intention. Profile shots of Paul against the mill, the sails and the Norfolk sky behind him. The square format demands that you slow down and I was glad of it by then. The morning had been fast and full and the Bronica made me stop and look properly at what was in front of me.

What was in front of me was a man in his working life, doing work that almost nobody else in England can do, in a place that would fall into silence without him. The mill at Toft Monks works because Paul Kemp exists. That is not a small thing.

The Material

Between the portraits and the leaving I made a series of close studies of the mill itself - the surfaces and components that Paul’s hands know better than anyone. Timber grain worn smooth by decades of contact. Iron forged by hand and darkened by weather. Brickwork repaired across multiple lifetimes. Every surface carries the evidence of use and of care.

The Mill at Toft Monks

Toft Monks drainage mill stands on the edge of the Norfolk Broads near Beccles, one of the surviving drainage mills that once numbered in the hundreds across the marshlands of Norfolk and Suffolk. These mills were not built to grind grain. They were built to pump water - to lift it from the low-lying fields into the drainage dykes that kept the Broads farmland workable. Without the mills, the land flooded. Without the millwrights who maintained them, the mills stopped. The relationship between craft and landscape was not metaphorical. It was hydraulic.

The mill had fallen into disrepair before its current owners undertook a complete refurbishment - a two-year project carried out by a team of specialist craftspeople. Luke Bonwick served as millwright consultant and architect. Paul Kemp led on the gearing, metalwork, and getting the mill running. Alex Hunter and Gary May produced the timber elements - the new curb, cap frame, rafters, cladding, fan stage, fan blades, brake wheel, sails, and the wooden striking gear components. Damian Burton-Pye and his team renewed ten courses of brickwork below the cap, installed new floors and beams, and carried out structural repairs to the tower.

The result is a mill that works. Not as a museum piece. Not as a decorative landmark. As a machine - a machine that can catch the wind and turn it into mechanical force, the way it was designed to do, because the craftspeople who restored it understood the building well enough to make it whole again.

He knows every timber in it, every joint, every tendency in different winds. That knowledge lives nowhere except in him and in the handful of people like him scattered across the county.

The session ended naturally, the way good sessions do, without a formal close. We stood and talked for a while in the shadow of the mill. Then Paul had somewhere else to be, and so did we.

What Is a Millwright

The word millwright dates to the medieval period. It described the person who built and maintained the mechanisms of a mill - water mills and windmills alike. Unlike a carpenter, who works with static timber, or a smith, who works with metal alone, the millwright works at the intersection of multiple materials and multiple forces. They must understand the whole machine as a system: the sails that catch the wind, the cap that turns to face it, the main shaft that transmits the power, the gears that step it down, and the stones that grind the grain.

At the height of England’s milling history, there were thousands of working windmills across the eastern counties. Norfolk alone had over three hundred. Each required a millwright for its construction and for its ongoing maintenance - the annual inspection of timbers, the replacement of worn components, the adjustment of sails and gears, the constant attention that keeps a moving building from shaking itself apart.

Today the working mills number in the dozens. The millwrights number in fewer. The trade is not on the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts - not because it is safe but because there are so few practitioners that the trade barely registers as a category. It exists in the space between craft and civil engineering, taught by apprenticeship and sustained by practice, and it survives only as long as the people who carry it continue to work.

The skills required are specific and cannot be acquired quickly. A millwright must be able to read timber - to identify species, to assess grain direction and structural soundness, to select the right piece for a component that will bear load in a specific way for decades. They must be able to work at height, in confined spaces, in weather. They must understand the aerodynamics of a sail - how the angle of the shutters affects the speed of the mill, how the twist along the length of a stock translates wind into rotation. And they must understand the specific history and character of each individual mill they work on, because no two mills are identical and the solutions that work on one may not work on another.

Paul learned from the generation before him, who learned from the generation before them, in an unbroken chain of practical knowledge extending back centuries. The chain is now very thin. When the current generation of millwrights retires, the question is not whether the knowledge will be diminished. It is whether it will survive at all.