Category Archives: Industrial history

Churnet Valley Railway

On Friday March 7th 2025 the enterprising, ambitious Churnet Valley Railway operated the first passenger-carrying train to the site of its new Leek (Churnet Valley) station: Our First Heritage Open Day – What A Huge Success! – Churnet Valley Railway.

(I wish the CHR had not hijacked the brand ‘Heritage Open Day’ which has been the brand of England’s annual celebration of the nation’s history and culture since 1994.)

Leek is a market town with a current population of twenty thousand, which until 1965 was an important rail crossroads created by the North Staffordshire Railway, the much-loved “Knotty”, linking the Staffordshire Moorlands with Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield and Uttoxeter, where main lines extended to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Derby.

The north-to-south route stretched from near Macclesfield to Uttoxeter on the line from Crewe to Derby, while the westerly route reached Leek from Stoke-on-Trent. A branch line eastwards from Leek Brook to Waterhouses formed an end-on junction with the 2ft 6in-gauge Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway, built to serve a dairy at Ecton though the terminus was further on at Hulme End. It opened in 1904 and closed thirty years later, shortly after the creamery at Ecton closed.

Services declined in stages between 1956 and 1970, except for a freight connection between the Oakamoor Sand Sidings and Stoke. Track was lifted but the trackbed remains on the ten-mile line westwards between Leek and Stoke and south from Oakamoor to Alton Towers and Denstone. The routes north from Leek to Macclesfield and south of Denstone to Uttoxeter have been blocked by redevelopment, including road improvements and the vast JCB factory at Rocester.

The site of the original Leek station is now a Morrisons supermarket.

The Churnet Valley Railway punches well above its weight. It grew out of earlier efforts to safeguard the railways around Leek from 1971 onwards, and from small beginnings focused on taking over the seven-mile route through the valley between Oakamoor and Leek Brook, which was accomplished when heritage train services began in 1996. The further mile to the site of the new Leek station was added in 2024.

The stations are interesting in their own right and a testament to the energy behind their restoration.

Leek Brook is only accessible by rail at present. It was the junction for the St Edward’s Hospital tramway, which ran three-quarters of a mile through the grounds of the Staffordshire County Mental Hospital, using 220-volt DC electric overhead. Passengers were conveyed in a second-hand London horse tram, but the main purpose of the tramway was supplying the hospital with coal. Passenger service didn’t last beyond the 1920s, but the coal traffic continued to the end of 1954.

Cheddleton station is the only original building remaining, and was famously saved in 1974 by a local businessman, Norman Hancock, parking his Jaguar on the level crossing to prevent its demolition. The station was subsequently listed Grade II and became the original base of the grandly-titled Cheshire and Staffordshire Railway Society which ultimately became the Churnet Valley Railway.

Consall station was opened in 1902 to serve the nearby village and the workers of the adjacent forge and lime kilns. The main building on the down platform is a reproduction, completed in 2002, after which the original 1902 shelter was reinstated on the restored up platform which abuts the Caldon Canal.

Kingsley & Froghall station is a convincing reproduction of the demolished original station. After passenger services were restored in 2001, the main building on the down platform was completed two years later, followed by the shelter on the opposite side which, like Consall, overhangs the canal.

Timetabled services run on Wednesdays and at weekends from March to October, with additional operations for special events on bank holidays and other occasions: E vents Calendar – Churnet Valley Railway.

The on-train catering offers an impressive range of alternatives, from breakfast to curry night, and there is a tea-room at Kingsley & Froghall. Prices range from £15 for pie-and-mash to £80 for a murder-mystery experience: S team Train Dining Experiences – Churnet Valley Railway.

This is a heritage railway that’s going places.

Putting the heart in the city

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Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2010) © Mike Higginbottom

Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield (2024) © Hasna Khan

Leah’s Yard, so long unrecognised except by historians and industrial archaeologists, is at last established as the jewel in the crown of Sheffield’s game-changing Heart of the City development.

In an astute comment to an article in the Sheffield Tribune in October 2023, Robin Hughes pointed out that the prehistory of Heart of the City goes back to the 1960s when Sheffield City Council decided not to demolish much of the city centre to accommodate a ring road inside the inner ring road and awarded the flagship retail site on Cambridge Street to what was then Cole Brothers.

Subsequent development schemes came and went, yet the beauty of Heart of the City, led by the Director of City Centre Development, Nalin Seneviratne from 2017, is its piecemeal but coherent configuration, which has respected many though not all the surviving heritage buildings.

Most people who think about it would describe Leah’s Yard as a set of “little mesters” workshops, where the myriad small craftsmen worked together in close co-operation at their highly specialised metal trades for which Sheffield has been celebrated for centuries.

In fact, in its early days Leah’s Yard belonged to single occupants, initially a toolmaker, George Linley, who occupied the site in either 1817 or 1825. By 1842 it had become John Morton’s Coalpit Lane Horn Works, making handles for cutlery and knives.

(The coal pit was an outcrop where Furnival Gate now runs. Coalpit Lane was renamed when the Duke of Cambridge laid the foundation stone of the Crimea Monument at the top of The Moor in 1857.)

The works remained a horn manufactory until a die-stamper, Henry Leah, took over in 1891.

The Leahs found they had more room than they needed for their business and let space to up to eighteen different tradesmen at one time. By the beginning of the twentieth century Leah’s Yard was indeed a little mesters’ workplace.

Henry Leah’s son, grandson and great-grandson successively ran the place until 1976 when their business was amalgamated with Spear & Jackson.

The site was listed Grade II* in 1983 for its rarity and completeness. This presented difficulties for development planners and arguably ensured that the heritage buildings around Cambridge Street should be incorporated in the new build.

Leah’s Yard had no future as a museum piece, and the patina of grime and grit has had to go. I’m told that the restoration had more latitude than would have been possible in a historically accurate recreation.

Scrubbed up but outwardly intact, managed by local entrepreneurs James O’Hara and Tom Wolfenden, Leah’s Yard is already proving a magnet for high-end retailers and small businesses: the digital news outlet Tribune has relocated to the Yard, as has the podcast creator Persephonica.

Leah’s Yard preserves a precious though not unique piece of Sheffield’s heritage, echoing the diversity of the industrial past.

Its significance deserves light-touch interpretative displays so that visitors can discover the meaning of the place.

Meanwhile, the planners’ next dilemma sits across the road, where the former Cole Brothers store is waiting for a fresh purpose.

Wagon hoists

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Leeds Central Wagon Hoist, Tower Square, Leeds

The centrepiece of Leeds’ Wellington Place development is called Tower Square, because its unlikely landmark is a rare survival of Victorian railway technology, one of a pair of towers that housed hoists to move freight wagons up and down between the now-demolished viaduct approaching Central Station and ground level.

Built in 1850, the Leeds Central Wagon Hoist is now celebrated. Thanks to the developer MEPC investing £1.5 million the derelict Grade II listed rarity has been turned into a free-entry mini-museum which tells the story of the defunct railway line and the vanished passenger station that closed in 1967.

This Yorkshire Post feature illustrates how much the site has changed – Leeds Central Station: What remains of Leeds city centre’s ‘other’ train station (yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk) – and the attractive displays inside the tower are enlivened with a soundscape of departure announcements and passing trains.

As far as I can discover, there are only two other surviving wagon hoists in Britain.

One is easily viewed from Platform 8 of Huddersfield railway station. Attached to the Grade II listed goods warehouse dating from 1885, this hoist is supported by cast-iron Doric columns and it seems that the lifting equipment remains. An urban-explorer report dated 2015 shows the spacious empty interior but the photographer either couldn’t find or didn’t recognise the interest of the hoist: Report – – LNWR/LYR Goods Warehouse, Huddersfield – April 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk.

The other, also listed Grade II, is at Goole in East Yorkshire: Coal Wagon Hoist, Railway Dock © David Dixon :: Geograph Britain and Ireland.

There are archive images of other wagon-hoists, no longer in existence, at –

The only moving-image footage I can find to show a wagon-hoist in action is a twenty-second clip in a documentary about freight transport in Sheffield: Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12). This footage, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits, and explains why, with hindsight, the well-intentioned modernisation of archaic operating practices didn’t stand the test of time. Railway goods sheds and stations aren’t given as much attention as passenger stations, civil engineering works and rolling stock, but they are amply covered in John Minnis and Simon Hickman’s The Railway Goods Shed and Warehouse in England (Historic England 2016), free to download at Goods Sheds 140pp.indd (historicengland.org.uk).

Foxton Inclined Plane

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Foxton Inclined Plane, Grand Union Canal, Leicestershire

Sir Edward Leader Williams’ Anderton Boat Lift (1875) in Cheshire successfully enabled canal boats to move between the River Weaver and the Trent & Mersey Canal, a vertical distance of fifty feet. Despite problems with maintenance it worked efficiently for over a century, and after a radical overhaul in 2000-02 it’s now likely to operate for another hundred years.

A completely different, less fortunate engineering solution to the same difficulty was tried in the Midlands, on the border between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire near Market Harborough.

The engineers who built the old Grand Union Canal at the beginning of the nineteenth century faced a similar situation at Foxton, where their main line climbed 75ft from a junction with a branch canal to Market Harborough up to the summit level.

The solution was a staircase of ten locks, opened in 1813, which took narrow boats forty-five minutes to travel. At the other end of the summit pound, at Watford Gap, another flight of locks dropped 54ft 1in.

In 1894 the Grand Junction Canal company amalgamated with the old Grand Union and the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire canals to operate the trunk route between Leicestershire and London as a single entity.

It still seemed practical at the end of the nineteenth century to compete with the railways for bulk, non-urgent freight traffic, using broad barges, provided the bottlenecks at the narrow locks at Foxton and Watford were eliminated.

The Grand Junction engineer Gordon Cale Thomas devised and patented a steam-powered lift that drew tanks, called caissons, laterally up a ramp between the top and bottom of the old locks: Foxton Inclined Plane – Foxton Inclined Plane – Wikipedia.

This device, which opened in 1900, had numerous advantages: each caisson could carry two wide barges between the two levels in twelve minutes and, whereas canal locks lose a lockful of water whenever a boat passes up or down, the lift lost hardly any water at all.

The disadvantages were that the winding engines had to be kept constantly in steam whether there was traffic or not, and there turned out to be insufficient traffic to justify the ongoing cost.

Perversely, the canal company chose to rebuild the Watford locks as narrow locks, simply moving the bottleneck further south and leaving the Foxton incline underused. A boat lift at Watford would have speeded up traffic dramatically, and may have yielded better cost benefits.

Because the main carrier, Fellows Morton & Clayton, demanded twenty-four-hour working, Foxton Locks was rebuilt, also as narrow locks, in 1909 and the incline was mothballed after ten years. It was used intermittently when the locks needed repair until it was scrapped in 1928.

Its site was abandoned for nearly half a century until it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1973, and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust was founded in 1980.

Nowadays the site of the ramp is cleared and the scale of this sophisticated piece of Victorian canal engineering is apparent to visitors. The reconstructed boiler-house is a museum which explains the vanished incline and the Trust intends eventually to restore the lift.

It won’t happen any time soon, but the Trust is actively curating the site and maintaining public awareness of a fascinating corner of the canal network: https://www.fipt.org.uk/copy-of-about-fipt.

Anderton Boat Lift

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In the early 1970s, the time when I learnt about industrial archaeology from the Arkwright Society based in Cromford, there was a sense of urgency about witnessing, if not safeguarding, relics of the Industrial Revolution that were deteriorating and going out of use.

The Arkwright Society had among its members Leslie Bradley (1902-2004), formerly headmaster of Derby School from 1942 to 1961, who led a succession of canal day-trips which were themselves an education. Leslie knew his way around the canal system because he had, like Tom Rolt, converted a narrow boat to a leisure craft before many other people took to the idea.

In 1973 Leslie ran a trip including potentially a last chance to experience taking a boat through the Anderton Boat Lift. This unique survivor was built in 1875, rebuilt in 1906-08, and was clearly nearing the end of its useful life.

It was built to provide a more efficient link between the Weaver Navigation which served the Cheshire salt beds and the Trent & Mersey Canal, which connected with the industrial heart of the Midlands and the waterways of northern England.

The Lift replaced the collection of chutes, cranes and inclined planes dating from the end of the eighteenth century that transhipped freight up and down the fifty-foot vertical distance between the two waterways.

It was designed by Sir Edward Leader Williams (1828-1901), the chief engineer of the North Staffordshire Railway which owned the Trent & Mersey Canal, as a development of the lifts designed by James Green (1781-1849) for the Grand Western Canal in Devon. Sir Edward proposed an iron tower containing two caissons, side by side, to lift and lower floating narrow boats, powered by hydraulic rams assisted when necessary by a steam engine.

The Weaver Navigation Act (1872) empowered the river trustees to construct the lift, which opened to canal traffic on July 26th 1875. Boats gain access from the river at the base of the lift which stands on an island in the middle of the river, like Williams’ later Barton Swing Aqueduct (1893). At the top of the structure an iron aqueduct leads vessels into the canal on its embankment.

The polluted canal water that powered the hydraulics repeatedly caused difficulties with the machinery over the following three decades. The trustees were advised by their engineer Colonel John Arthur Saner (1864-1952) to install a system of electric motors and counterweights which would be cheaper and easier to maintain and had the advantage that the caissons could operate independently rather than in tandem. However, the full 252-ton weight of the water-filled caissons was no longer cushioned by the rams, so Colonel Saner reinforced the structure with steel A-girders to support pulleys that led the wire ropes which bore the load.

The conversion from hydraulic to electric power took place within two years, 1906-08, and operated efficiently until the 1970s, despite increasing doubts about the effect of atmospheric pollution on the integrity of the structure. A 1983 inspection revealed such severe corrosion that the Lift was closed immediately.

Fortunately, it had been listed as a Scheduled Monument in 1976, so there was no likelihood it would be dismantled, but it stood idle until an admirable £7,000,000 restoration programme brought it back to life in 2000-02.

The Lift is now once more hydraulic-powered using oil, and the redundant A-frames and pulleys remain to show how the structure looked for most of its working life. The heavy counterweights were not replaced, and now form a maze in the grounds of the two-storey visitor centre.

Now the traffic is no longer salt but people – leisure boaters and day visitors.

I’m glad to think that Leslie Bradley lived long enough to know of the restoration. It was industrial-archaeology pioneers like him who helped to save for future generations a priceless legacy of mementos of British industrial genius.

Brinsley Headstocks

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The Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire coalfield, like other British coalfields, has a mining heritage of which its inhabitants are justifiably proud. The prosperity and power of the United Kingdom was, in the age of steam, almost entirely fuelled by the labour of the country’s coal-miners.

A mile away from the Nottinghamshire market town of Eastwood, the Brinsley Headstocks have long been a landmark from the days when the green fields of the Erewash valley yielded black wealth from below to power the Industrial Revolution.

The Headstocks deserve the overused adjective “iconic” because they’re distinctive and unique.

To industrial archaeologists they’re precious as the only surviving example of tandem headstocks, by which two adjacent mine-shafts could be wound by one winding engine.

To readers of English literature they’re treasured because the site is featured in the early fiction of the local writer D H Lawrence (1885-1930) in his short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911) and his novel Sons and Lovers (1913).

Lawrence certainly knew Brinsley Colliery, because his father Arthur worked there, and his grandfather Bert before him. The colliery was still operational, though no longer drawing coal, when the 1960 film of Sons and Lovers was made, and the headstocks, painted an uncharacteristic shade of pale blue to show up in monochrome, are part of the movie’s background.

The colliery began as shallow workings in the early nineteenth century, and the deep second shaft was sunk in 1872. The original headstocks were badly damaged in an explosion in 1883, and were either repaired or replaced by a pair from the nearby Willey Wood colliery which had closed in the late 1870s.

After it ceased producing coal in 1934 Brinsley Colliery was retained for ventilation and to provide underground access to neighbouring collieries at Moorgreen and Pye Hill, so when it was finally closed and sealed off in 1970 it presented an important example of untouched nineteenth-century mining practice, which the industrial archaeologist Alan Griffin detailed in ‘Brinsley Colliery: a conflict of evidence’, Industrial Archaeology, vol 9, no 1 (February 1972), pp 28-47/100.

The above-ground buildings were demolished and the headstocks transported to the then new Coal Museum at Lound Hall near Retford. When that museum closed in 1989 the Brinsley Headstocks were returned to their original location as the centrepiece of a wildlife reserve and picnic site that is maintained by the volunteer Friends of Brinsley Headstocks.

Problems have arisen because inspections by the local authority, Broxtowe Borough Council, revealed a serious physical danger to the visiting public. The site was fenced off initially; in September 2023 the winding wheels were removed to reduce the load on the timberwork, and in December the entire structure was dismantled and some of the timber chopped up.

This caused uproar in the local community, and the Friends were left uninformed of what had been done and why: ‘Disgust’ in Nottinghamshire village as historic mining feature removed without consultation – Nottinghamshire Live (nottinghampost.com); ‘It makes me want to cry’: anger over Brinsley Headstocks demolition | Nottinghamshire | The Guardian.

There is no need for this. Keeping the local community in the dark is bound to generate more heat than light: “Nobody’s informed us what was happening…This village isn’t Brinsley any more.”

In an age where communication has never been easier, yet the scope for misunderstanding through haste is abundant, it should be a priority to manage with care the relationship between local communities and the elected representatives who serve them.

I have no personal connection with Brinsley, but in my native Sheffield I continue to come across situations where amenities are threatened and the people who care about them feel they aren’t heard: History repeats itself | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times. In some parts of the city you need only say “trees” to provoke a reaction.

Broxtowe Borough Council has proposed three strategies to restore the Headstocks site, two of which don’t seem at all satisfactory: News (brinsleyheadstocks.org ). Before the councillors decide how to proceed, they need to ensure that their constituents feel that they’re being listened to.

When you need to get out of a hole, or a mine shaft, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Update: In July 2024 Broxtowe Borough Council announced that the Headstocks would indeed be rebuilt in oak at an estimated cost of up to £220,000 – the most expensive option, with an annual maintenance cost of £6,000: Brinsley Headstocks mining landmark to be reconstructed after public outcry | Heritage | The Guardian.

Rylands Building

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John Rylands (1801-1888) was a Manchester textile manufacturer whose name lives on in the John Rylands Library, founded as a memorial by his widow Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908) and opened in 1900.

From 1822 his company, Rylands & Sons Ltd, occupied a site in the city’s High Street in what is now called the Northern Quarter, and replaced these premises with the Rylands Building (1929-32), a bulky modern textile warehouse on Market Street faced in Portland stone with distinctive corner turrets, in a sober version of Art Deco.

The architects were Harry Smith Fairhurst (1868-1945) and his son Philip Garland Fairhurst (1900-1987). The elder Fairhurst had already built Lancaster House (1905-1910), India House (1906) and Bridgewater House (1912), all on Whitworth Street, and York House (1910-11, demolished 1974) on Major Street – all of them to the Manchester pattern of a packing house and wholesale showroom.

The Rylands Building is prominently visible at the corner of Piccadilly Gardens, an ornamental space opened up on the site of the demolished Manchester Royal Infirmary.

In 1957 the huge Rylands headquarters was bought by the owners of Paulden’s department store after a fire destroyed their All Saints premises south of the city centre. The splendid architectural treatment, inside and out, and the vast amount of floor space made the former warehouse an admirable retail store, which was rebranded by its ultimate owners, Debenhams, in 1973.

The debacle that led to the complete closure of the Debenhams chain in 2021 meant that the Rylands Building suddenly became a huge void in the heart of Manchester’s retail quarter – half a million square feet of retail floor-space over ten floors encased in a magnificent and prominent building within sight of the city’s tourist hub, Piccadilly Gardens, and within reach of the nearby Northern Quarter.

The way forward is Rylands Manchester. The developer AM Alpha gained permission for a scheme by Jeffrey Bell Architects adding four storeys on top of the present roof to compensate for carving an open atrium out of the centre bringing natural light within the building from the second to the seventh floor.

The project respects the appearance of the 1929 design while observing the Manchester Zero-Carbon Action Plan which aims to make Greater Manchester carbon-neutral by 2038 [Zero Carbon Manchester | Zero Carbon Manchester | Manchester City Council]. Insulation, glazing and energy provision will conform to expected future needs, and the respect for original architectural detail includes installing up-to-date Crittall Windows units corresponding with the appearance of the original fenestration.

The finished scheme will offer 70,000 square feet of retail space at ground level, 258,000 square feet of office space above and a winter garden on the sixth floor. The atrium storeys each include open space, terraced to provide sight of the sky and sheltered by a glazed roof: https://www.maxfordham.com/projects/the-rylands-building.

Work is expected to be completed by 2025, a tribute to Manchester’s efficacy in grabbing opportunities to improve the urban environment, as it did after the IRA bomb-attack in 1996.

An urban-explorer report uploaded in April 2023 reveals surviving architectural details in the less-frequented areas of the Rylands Building: Exploring Manchester’s Abandoned Debenhams: Found 1930s Secrets – YouTube.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Brown Bayley’s steam wagons

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Brown Bayley Steels Ltd, Sentinel steam lorry no 6 (1968)

I’m very grateful to Stephen Johnson for providing me with a copy of his book The Other Mr Brown’s Business: a short history of the firm of Brown Bayley’s Steel Works Ltd, Sheffield (2021), which is a significant contribution to the history of the Sheffield steel industry.

My maternal granddad was a furnace bricklayer at Brown Bayley’s until shortly after the end of the Second World War, but my memory of the works in the 1950s is the common sight of their steam wagons, forerunners of the modern lorry, chugging around the streets.

The steam wagon like its contemporary, the electric tramcar, occupies the window between the initial superseding of horse power with mechanical traction and the eventual dominance of the internal combustion engine.

They were powerful and relatively fast, capable of 20mph fully loaded, and in their heyday far superior for their purpose to early petrol lorries.

Brown Bayley’s wagons were Sentinel Standard flat-bed lorries, mostly dating from the time of the First World War, bought to transport heavy materials around the company’s extensive Attercliffe steelworks and on occasions used for delivering materials further afield.

A well-documented journey in 1925 transported five-ton lengths of chain in three trips to stabilise the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, taking just over two days each way, with a day to unload at the destination.

The Brown Bayley fleet consisted of at least a dozen vehicles at its maximum, almost all of them registered in Shrewsbury rather than Sheffield or Rotherham by the manufacturer, Sentinel Waggon [sic] Works Ltd.

Brown Bayley’s wagons survived because they were robust and dependable, but they required a two-man crew like a railway steam locomotive, and they took ninety minutes to prepare from cold and used 1½cwt (1,524kg) of coke per shift.

Nevertheless they continued to work until 1970, when the last three were taken out of use. The remaining wagons were snapped up for preservation by enthusiasts, apart from No 6 (AW 2964) which the Brown Bayley company exhibited at rallies. It remains on static display at the Riverside Museum, Glasgow.

Others are still going strong, as these YouTube clips illustrate: What’s the Greatest Machine of the 1930s…the Sentinel Steam Waggon? – YouTube; Sentinel/ERF No.9370 ‘Typhoo’ Norwich to Ledbury – YouTube.

Forty Bridges

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Great Northern Railway Pinxton Branch: Giltbrook Viaduct (1973)

One of the highlights of my freelance history lecturing work is speaking to the Kimberley Historical Society, north of Nottingham, where I’m made welcome and feel I know many of the members after repeated visits.

Almost invariably, my lecture is introduced by the chairman, Roy Plumb, and a few years ago I looked forward to visiting as a guest to sit back and listen to Roy lecture on the railways of Kimberley and the neighbouring settlement of Awsworth.

It didn’t work out because of a mix-up of dates, but I eventually caught up with Roy’s presentation when he spoke to the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct at the Hogs Head Pub and Restaurant at Awsworth on January 31st this year.

Roy continues to use a Carousel projector to show his slides, and achieves a clarity and precision that rivals digital projection. He also has a steady hand with a laser pointer – a skill which I lack – and his account of the growth and decline of the local railways from 1797 until the early 1960s was masterly.

Two rival railway companies served the area between the Erewash and Leen valleys, the Midland and the Great Northern, bitter rivals trying to grab the coal trade from each other. The Great Northern’s ambitious Derbyshire & Staffordshire Extension opened in 1878, running to Derby Friargate and beyond and with a branch up the Erewash Valley to Pinxton, and the Midland’s Bulwell-Bennerley Branch began working freight trains a year later.

Both lines entailed heavy civil engineering. The Great Northern built the now-celebrated Bennerley Viaduct, which survived because its wrought-iron construction made demolition uneconomic in the 1970s.

At Awsworth Junction, where the Pinxton branch diverged from the Great Northern main line, the Giltbrook Viaduct curved across a road, two Midland Railway lines and the Greasley Arm of the Nottingham Canal. Almost a third of a mile long, it was known locally as the Forty Bridges, though there were in fact forty-three arches,

Two arches, 8 and 23, were occupied by four-storey dwellings, which were used by construction workers and later served as an air-raid shelter for Awsworth schoolchildren during the First World War. Their chimney pots graced the viaduct’s parapet.

This magnificent sinuous structure has disappeared because unlike the Bennerley Viaduct its brick-arch construction made it practical to demolish. It was taken down in 1973, and much of the trackbed of the Pinxton Branch as far as Eastwood became the A610 trunk road. Local people of a certain age still bemoan the loss of a magnificent landmark; younger people haven’t a clue it ever existed.

If I’ve read the 1899-1900 25-inch Ordnance Survey sheet correctly, the Hogs Head pub stands on or near the site of Gilt Briggs Farm, which was surrounded by a cat’s cradle of railway lines.

Stepping out into the night at the end of Roy’s talk, it was possible to sense the ghosts of great embankments and bridges, and the clatter of goods trains in the night, trundling across the arches sixty feet above ground level.

The National Library of Scotland website provides an overlay of historic Ordnance Survey maps against modern satellite imagery: Explore georeferenced maps – Map images – National Library of Scotland (nls.uk). If necessary key the name ‘Awsworth’ into the search panel.

Aqueduct Cottage

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Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2010)

Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2020)

Aqueduct Cottage, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (2022)

Among the wealth of industrial archaeology structures at the north end of the Cromford Canal, one of the most photographed is the picturesque little lock-keeper’s cottage at the end of the Wigwell Aqueduct, guarding the junction with the private Lea Wood branch.

This branch canal was constructed in 1802 by Peter Nightingale (great-uncle of Florence) to his mills at Lea Bridge 2½ furlongs away. In 1819, as a result of a dispute over water rights, the branch was reduced to half its length and the wharf resited.

The lock at the junction was required to maintain the water-level in the branch at twelve inches higher than the main line, so that there was no risk of the canal losing water to the branch or vice versa. An 1811 map shows that only half the existing building is original, extended sometime in the nineteenth century to make two dwellings, each with its own front door, and later combined to make a single house with the second doorway converted to a window.

Maintaining a household in this remote spot must always have been arduous. Anne Eaton, who lived with her husband Josiah in the two-bedroomed cottage in the 1890s, raised eight children there. She was on social terms with Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), whose family continued to own the surrounding land after selling the mills to the Smedley family in 1893.

The canal branch was last used in 1936, and traffic ceased on the main line from Hartshay to Cromford two years later. The then owner, the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, formally abandoned the canal in 1944.

The local writer Alison Uttley (1884-1976) called Aqueduct Cottage “a Hans Anderson dwelling”, but she didn’t have to live in it.

By the time Lea Wood was sold to a private owner, Mr Bowmer, in 1951 the lack of amenities at the cottage was daunting. The last occupant, Mr Bowler, lived there alone without piped water, sanitation, gas or electricity, until circa 1970.

The Derwent Valley section of the Cromford Canal was taken into guardianship by Derbyshire County Council in 1974 and most of it declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in 1981, but when Lea Wood was sold to the Leawood Trust for the benefit of the community there seemed no practical way to make the cottage usable, let alone habitable.

After the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site was established in 2001 the County Council produced a Conservation Management Plan which identified Aqueduct Cottage as a significant heritage asset.

In 2012 the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust took over Lea Wood, the canal branch and the cottage, and a volunteer group set about returning Aqueduct Cottage to its nineteenth-century condition as a visitor centre which, despite the interruption of the pandemic, is well on its way to completion [https://www.crichstandard.org/tourism/aqueduct-cottage-restoring-a-local-landmark.php], proving what can be done for a building on the brink with inspiration, energy and the know-how to find funding.

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