Mill Drove

Mill Drove in springtime

One of the most attractive thoroughfares in the town is Mill Drove, built on farmland in the second half of the 20th century when the front gardens of the houses were planted with a variety of trees and shrubs including weeping willow, japonica, forsythia, flowering cherry and magnolia that provide an attractive vista during the spring and summer months to the open fenland beyond. 

Until the 19th century, this was little more than a farm track with deep ruts caused by the regular use of wagons and horses but the first road was constructed in 1873. The Vestry Meeting on Friday 24th May instructed the surveyors of highways "to metal and construct a hard road to be called Mill Drove" and the occupiers of the few houses and cottages that did exist were invited to contribute by carting in stone and gravel to assist with the work of levelling the surface.

Since then Mill Drove has been developed as a residential area, and is a quiet and secluded road in a much sought after location and one of the gardens even boasts a huge monkey-puzzle tree that is quite rare. The street originally existed as Mill Road, a name derived from Wherry’s Mill, a four-sailed windmill that stood at the junction with North Road and finally demolished in June 1994 to make way for a new house. Memories of it, however, survive in the name of the adjoining house, a substantial Victorian property formerly owned by the late Tom Jones on whose land the remains of the mill stood. This property is known today as Mill House but it was sold on his death and in recent years has been used as a bed and breakfast business.

A handsome mid-20th century house built in 1951 by the late Len Pick

The surrounding area was mainly agricultural land that was swallowed up by private residential development to meet the demands of the population boom that started after the Second World War and most of the properties in Mill Drove were built from 1968 onwards with the Stephenson Way estate that is attached following in the mid-1970s. Another large estate sprang up during the early 1990s after developers were given permission in 1989 to build 300 new homes on thirty acres of agricultural land on the eastern end into the fen as far as the Car Dyke where the streets have been named after Second World War locations including the Battle of Arnhem in 1944 and the Burma campaign. The buyers here included a large number of retired people from the south east anxious to escape from escalating property prices in the London area. 

Poppies colonise the Mill Drove development in the late 1990s (left) and this is the scene  today (right), the streets on the new estates being named after locations from the Burma  campaign during the Second World War and the Battle of Arnhem in 1944. The photographs below show the changing seasons in Mill Drove, looking towards North Road

See also     Wherry's Mill     Railway gatehouses     North Road     

The Arnhem Connection      Poppies

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