page_title: Millennium Mills
section_title: Derek Jarman's The Last of England
hierarchical_section_title: Millennium Mills / Popular culture / Derek Jarman's The Last of England
caption_attribution_description: English: Destination Docklands concert image 1
context_page_description: The Millennium Mills is a derelict turn of the 20th century flour mill in West Silvertown on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock, between the Thames Barrier and the ExCeL London exhibition centre alongside the newly built Britannia village, in Newham, London, England. The Mills are currently undergoing a major renovation as part of a £3.5billion redevelopment of Silvertown.
  Along with Millennium Mills, there remains a small section of the now destroyed Rank Hovis Premier Mill and a restored grade II listed grain silo, labelled the 'D’ silo. Described by the Evening Standard in 2009 as a "decaying industrial anachronism standing defiant and alone in the surrounding subtopia", the Millennium Mills has become a well-loved icon of post-industrial Britain and has made its way into many aspects of popular culture, being used as a backdrop in films and television shows such as Ashes to Ashes, London's Burning and Derek Jarman's The Last of England. Millennium Mills is also a destination for Urban Explorers despite high security, dangers of structural weakness, ten-storey drops and asbestos, and there are many reports and internal photos of the site.
context_section_description: In 1987, British film-maker Derek Jarman released his self-shot avant-garde film The Last of England, which featured Millennium Mills as a key location. There was only one week of formal shooting for the film which occurred in November at the Royal Docks, an area Jarman described as "miles of desolation with the odd post-modern office building." In one scene it shows characters dancing on the roof of the empty Millennium Mills building.
  British writer and psychogeographer, Iain Sinclair talks about the use of Millennium mills in Derek Jarman's film, describing it as having "been christened by William Blake and delivered by Albert Speer"; the English Romantic poet and Adolf Hitler's chief architect. Sinclair goes on to call the mills "the perfect symbol for a cinematic endgame." In another piece of writing, Sinclair analyses Jarman as a man who "saw the downriver reaches of Silvertown, with its abandoned flour mills, as a site for dervish dances and the rituals of a punk apocalypse."
caption: Millennium Mills as a backdrop to the spectacular lighting and fireworks at the concert
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