Mary Mills with the Greenwich Millennium Village in the background

Local historian Mary Mills serves on Greenwich Council representing the Peninsula ward.

She moved to the borough from Gravesend in 1969 with her late husband, Alan. Both had been involved in the Gravesend Labour Party and got involved in local politics in Greenwich, too.

Following the death of Peninsula councillor Marian Moseley in 1999, Mary stood and was elected at a by-election early in 2000. “I’d been interested in the peninsula for a long time and when I was elected I’d already written a couple of books about it,” she says.

“I had been working in local regeneration monitoring and there’d been a long series of meetings with local people going back ten years so [as a councillor] I was talking again to people I’d been involved with in consultation exercises for a very long time.”

Dr Mills completed a PhD in the gas industries and works with the Greenwich Industrial History Society. She was one of the first councillors in the borough to embrace the use of blogs and twitter as a way of communicating with residents.