Before the brickfields of Brixton there were wheat fields and it was to service these that Ashby’s Mill was built halfway up the hill in 1816, its magnificent sails visible for miles around.

In the same year Vauxhall Bridge opened, one of several new river crossings at the time that made south London accessible and precipitated a wave of housebuilding. People in the city were eager to escape the noise and dirt and by the middle of the century the fields were disappearing under street after street of villas and terraces.

Even the miller, John Ashby, succumbed, striking a deal with local builder John Muggeridge to erect a row of seven houses on the eastern half of his land, creating what is now Blenheim Gardens.

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