Temple Mills

Temple Mills is a northerly part of Stratford, south of Leyton, located on the boundary of the London borough of Newham and Waltham Forest in east LondonTemple Mills was home to a marshalling yard and wagon works belonging to the Great Eastern Railway. Temple Mills Lane is to the north of the London 2012 Olympic ParkHistoryMedieval Hackney was almost entirely rural with much land owned by Sir Thomas Mead. Agriculture and related trades were the main forms of employment. Arable crops were grown, such as beans, wheat, oats and barley. This created a need for milling of the grain, and there were several mills in Hackney. Temple Mills were water mills belonging to the Knights Templar, used mainly for grinding corn from their extensive lands in Homerton and the Marshes. The mills straddled the River Lea and so were partly in Hackney and partly in Leyton. During the 17th century and 18th century, the former Templar mills were used for a variety of industrial purposes. These included grinding rapeseed for oil, processing leather, making brass kettles, twisting yarn, and manufacturing sheet lead. Gunpowder production at the mills led to a tragedy on the night before Easter 1690, when Peter Pain (a Huguenot refugee from Dieppe) was blown up together with two of the mills, three stone houses, and a vast quantity of gunpowder manufactured by him for the government. His family, and a French minister, also died in the blast.

Temple Mills is a northerly part of Stratford, south of Leyton, located on the boundary of the London borough of Newham and Waltham Forest in east LondonTemple Mills was home to a marshalling yard and wagon works belonging to the Great Eastern Railway. Temple Mills Lane is to the north of the London 2012 Olympic ParkHistoryMedieval Hackney was almost entirely rural with much land owned by Sir Thomas Mead. Agriculture and related trades were the main forms of employment. Arable crops were grown, such as beans, wheat, oats and barley. This created a need for milling of the grain, and there were several mills in Hackney. Temple Mills were water mills belonging to the Knights Templar, used mainly for grinding corn from their extensive lands in Homerton and the Marshes. The mills straddled the River Lea and so were partly in Hackney and partly in Leyton. During the 17th century and 18th century, the former Templar mills were used for a variety of industrial purposes. These included grinding rapeseed for oil, processing leather, making brass kettles, twisting yarn, and manufacturing sheet lead. Gunpowder production at the mills led to a tragedy on the night before Easter 1690, when Peter Pain (a Huguenot refugee from Dieppe) was blown up together with two of the mills, three stone houses, and a vast quantity of gunpowder manufactured by him for the government. His family, and a French minister, also died in the blast.