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The Royal Gunpowder Mills has a long and fascinating history. It played an essential part in military history and national defense, as well as the development of civil industries such as mining and quarrying . It is a story with humble beginnings, of a family run business, which prospered and grew to become Crown property and a major local employer of workers in the Lea Valley. It became an ever expanding factory, constantly adapting to new technology, pulling in more and more workers to meet increasing demand for explosives and propellants.
Discover why a one-legged stool was a crucial health and safety implement. Find out how the factory workforce doubled during WW1 as women came to work at the Royal Gunpowder Mills. And explore the site's final phase as a top-secret research centre for Cold War inventions and rocketry.
A timeline of gunpowder development and related activities at the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills Read more
The Royal Gunpowder Mills site is an important industrial monument containing one of the most extensive ranges of industrial archaeology in the country. Read more
The Gunpowder and Explosives History Group was set up in October 2000. We had first met in 1985, drawn together by Alan Crocker, Glenys Crocker, and Phil Philo, and had decided to call ourselves the Gunpowder Mills Study Group. Read more
Internationally, the Royal Gunpowder Mills is amongst a handful of places associated with the manufacture of explosives dating back many centuries which have subsequently been preserved and opened to the public. Read more
Gunpowder is a mixture of the natural products saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal. Its beginnings are obscure... Read more
After the closure of ERDE, the archive material inherited passed through a number of hands and storage locations before opening to the public as an online database. Read more
Discover how firearms changed over the centuries by visiting our collection of over 300 historic firearms. Read more
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a narrow gauge railway was used to transport materials around the site. Read more