Review of 2003 🌍

I've been producing this news page for almost a full year now, so it's perhaps reasonable to provide a quick review of some of the notable items covered during the year.

Starting with the bad news, we lost two windmills in the UK this year - that of Chillenden lost to November's storms[#169], and that of Kenn simply to deliberate demolition[#165].

The good news included a good number of mills which got grants from the Heritage lottery fund[#84]. Other mills such as Brixton[#74] acquired new groups of friends, fighting for their preservation, and existing groups at Upminster[#111] and York[#44] gained charitable status, to help further their work. The BBC Restoration programme[#116] highlighted the need for money for restoration, and may have brought new money to the table.

The launch of the Mills Archive Online[#146] gave us a great resource for investigating historical aspects of mills, and a number of other interesting archives such as Viewfinder from English Heritage[#48], and British Pathe News[#155] came along with good mill inclusion. General search facilities at Google[#177] and Amazon.com[#145] also offered increased methods for tracking down information.

Wind energy was high in the news, with the UK government granting new licences for a number of offshore wind farms[#110] - and new turbines appeared onshore, including one just off the M25 at Kings Langley[#141], and even one temporarily installed on the South Bank[#167] in central London.

This site also went through considerable expansion, with the rounding out of the county coverage, and incorporation of the external collections from Peter Hedges and Mary McLauchlan. There's an increasing number of pages on watermills, and the windmill coverage also spread to more of the world, including The Netherlands, Spain, and The USA. There's also a number of other new subsidiary pages, such as supermarket, National Trust, and tallest windmills.