Ashby's Mill is just south of Allerton Street where my father, John Cutts, spent his early years. Alas that road, along with the rest of the Cornwall Road "village" was demolished in the late 1960s to make way for the dreary Blenheim Gardens estate.

In his book The Brighton Road, written in 1892, Charles Harper wrote:

"On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as it has been since 1816 when John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here, unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this hill-top, and London seemed far away."

When my father was grew up there in the early 20th century, Brixton Hill would still have been much as Harper described it. The "typical modern suburban developments" he referred to would have been the roads around Cornwall Road that you can see glimpses of in the second version of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much. If you scroll down to the first comment, you can see some stills from that film along with some early pictures of the windmill.