Before Clapham Common was encircled with roads, it was a patch of wasteland with hillocks, ditches, ponds and grazing for sheep and cattle.  Even it’s name means the homestead on stubby ground.  Daniel Lysons, in his Environs of London (1792) says “30 years ago it was little better than a morass and the roads were almost impassable”.  But owing to the “good taste and exertions of Christopher Balding Esq…its present state is well known and universally admired”.

The Windmill pub, which has stood on the Common since at least 1665, owes it’s name to a windmill that stood nearby.  The exact location is now obscure and to confuse matters, there are also references to two windmills.  A witness in a 1758 court case stated that his father remembered a windmill at Balham Wood Lane (now Nightingale Lane) transferred to the east part of the Common.  It is impossible to tell whether the inn was so named after the actual mill had been demolished.

The miller, Thomas Crenshaw, is noted in the parish records in 1665 as also being an alehouse keeper, but milling must have gradually become less important and beer selling more so, and by 1789, the Windmill Inn is noted as “a very genteel and good accustomed house, many years in the possession of Mrs Simmonds”.  (A Companion from London to Brighthelmson – J Edwards).  It also became a staging post for coaches, although Windmill Lane was still a rural track until 1840.

The Windmill Inn is pictured in J H Herring’s print Return from the Derby, showing a lively crowd of racegoers in front of the inn, and it seems it must have been a regular stopping point on Derby Day.  The Windmill was first leased by Young and Bainbridge in 1848 and the freehold was bought in 1899.  Holly Lodge, a small hotel that is now run with the Windmill, was bought by Young and co in 1945.