Birley Spa

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Birley Spa, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield: Large Plunging Bath (2008)

Birley Spa is a surprise,– a nineteenth-century bathing-resort hidden in the middle of the post-war Hackenthorpe housing-estate on the outskirts of Sheffield.

Local tradition maintains that the spa is ancient, but its documented history only dates from 1734 and its practical development followed a 1788 survey which proposed the building of a Bath Hotel, laying out paths and building two bridges across the stream.

In 1843 the Lord of the Manor, Charles, 2nd Earl Manvers, financed the development of the present building, incorporating a range of seven plunge- and shower-baths built into the hillside on the lower level, and on the upper floor a “lodging-house” with facilities to drink the waters as well as “tea, coffee and other refreshments”, run by a resident manager.

There were two distinct water-sources – an iron-bearing chalybeate spring for drinking, and the Large Plunging Bath was filled with “water as pure as chrystal [sic]”.

Birley Spa offered annual subscriptions from 15 shillings, and single baths ranged in price from the “Best Marble Hot Bath” at 2s 6d, to a simple cold plunge in the large bath at sixpence.  Subscribers to the Bath Charity were entitled to recommend “Poor Persons”, on a sliding scale, to make free use of the Spa.

A special omnibus-service ran from the Commercial Inn in the centre of Sheffield, twice daily except on Sundays.

The hotel closed in 1878 and its accommodation was converted first into residences.  The hot baths and showers fell out of use by 1895 and have now disappeared, but the large sandstone oval plunging bath, 25 feet by 18 feet and 5 feet deep, survives.

The grounds of the Spa were developed between the World Wars as a privately-operated children’s playground including a boating-lake and paddling pool, wishing well, swing-boats and a sandpit.  The now-demolished balcony of the Spa House was used as a bandstand.

All this activity ceased on the outbreak of war in 1939, and in the 1950s the site came into the possession of Sheffield City Housing Department, which in 1960 proposed to demolish the Spa buildings. 

The City Architect, Lewis Womersley, presented an alternative scheme to retain the buildings as a community hall, and this was partially completed in 1966.

Birley Spa was listed Grade II in 1973.

Although some essential maintenance was carried out in 1986, the site suffered increasingly from neglect and vandalism until in 1988 the City’s Countryside Management Unit began a programme of conservation, interpretation and restoration, involving local schools, community groups and the frogmen from South Yorkshire Police. 

The initial aim was to recreate the Spa as a local amenity, as it had been at two distinct periods in its history, initially by encouraging its use as a pleasure-ground, and later by restoring the bath-house to use and perhaps marketing the mineral water.

In the event, the restored bath-house has been displayed but not used, and it has been cared for by volunteers involved in a succession of groups which became the Birley Spa Preservation Trust in 2018.

The Spa has earned a place in the Victorian Society’s 2025 Top Ten Endangered Buildings list.

It deserves a future to match its past.

Brucciani’s, Morecambe

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Brucciani’s, Marine Road West, Morecambe

My friend John’s sixtieth birthday celebration was stylish and memorable – dinner in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, with the option of staying for the weekend in Art Deco splendour.

For me, the highlight was when we took his mother, Marjorie, for a morning cup of coffee at Brucciani’s on the seafront.

This celebrated and much-loved Italian milk bar is part of a family concern dating back to 1893 when Luigi Brucciani, aged thirteen, arrived with his family from Tuscany and settled in Barrow-in-Furness, across the bay from Morecambe.

Luigi’s son, Peter, opened the first of two Morecambe milk bars in 1932, followed by the current promenade location, almost next door to the Winter Gardens, the week before the start of World War II in 1939.

As war turned away the holidaymakers and killed the ice-cream trade, Brucciani’s prospered providing Italian coffee to military personnel.  After the war, when the holiday crowds and the ice cream returned, so did artistes at the Winter Gardens, including locally-born Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe (né Bartholomew), and Brucciuani’s grew from a milk bar to a café.

In July 2022, the then Prince Charles, as well as unveiling a plaque to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Winter Gardens, popped in to sample Brucciani’s ice cream.  He was served vanilla.

Luigi’s great-grandson, Paolo, speaks for his family at Spotlight on Bruccianis | Lancaster and Morecambe Bay.

Brucciani’s sells only their own ice-cream to an Italian recipe in more than a dozen flavours.  The décor has hardly changed, and is lovingly illustrated at Brucciani’s – Morecambe – Modern Mooch.

The Preston Brucciani’s, though it retains the name, has repeatedly changed hands since the 1970s:  Review: The historic Preston City Centre cafe that fails to live up to its potential | Blog Preston.

When John and I took his mother for coffee at Brucciani’s in Morecambe on a Saturday morning in January 2015, she said that she could remember the place when it first opened in September 1939. 

And, she declared, it hasn’t changed.

Sound café

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Sound Café, Isle of Man
Calf Sound and the Calf of Man (January 2008)

My friend John marks decennial birthdays in considerable style. 

For his fiftieth birthday, not long after he’d become a Manx resident, he hired the Sound Café, at the very tip of the island, and provided an entirely Manx buffet supper from lamb to queenies, so that guests from “across” (as Manx people refer to the other, larger island to the east) had the benefit of one of the finest of the many fine views around the island’s coast.

The café is a remarkable building, completed in 2002 to the designs of the Manx architects Kellett & Robinson.  It’s entirely unobtrusive in its magnificent setting, dug into the hillside with a grass roof, so that it’s invisible until you’ve walked past it.

It’s one of my favourite Manx places to eat and drink.

The panoramic picture windows look across to the other “other” island to the south, the Calf of Man, accessible with difficulty, despite its four harbours, because of the unpredictable waters of the Calf Sound, a treacherous stretch of water in which the current runs at up to eight knots.  (This didn’t dissuade a mid-nineteenth century owner, George Carey, a former London barrister, from attempting agriculture by swimming cattle across the Sound at low tide.)

Successive efforts to develop the Calf have had little success:  farming, lead mining and tourism alike failed, and in 1937 F J Dickens of Carnforth bought the island and presented it to the UK National Trust for preservation as a bird sanctuary.  It was leased to the newly-formed Manx National Trust in 1952, initially for twenty-one years, and is now vested in Manx National Heritage, and leased to the Manx Wildlife Trust.

The submerged Chicken Rock, 1½ miles south of the Calf, presented a hazard to shipping until the engineer Robert Stevenson built two lighthouses in 1818.  These were superseded by the Chicken Rock Lighthouse in 1875.  This was replaced with a new installation on the Calf in 1968, which was itself decommissioned in 2007:  Calf of Man.

The population in 1851 was 51, including four lighthouse keepers, but in the twenty-first century it is virtually uninhabited:  the wardens who maintain it as a wildlife sanctuary are resident between March and December, during which months the resident population is effectively two.

For the best of reasons, the Calf is not an easy place to visit:  Wayback Machine.  It’s much easier to chose a table at the Sound Café, and relax with a drink and a plate of Manx cuisine.


A brighter, purer and happier Sheffield

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The Victoria Hall, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

One of the admirable characteristics of the Methodist Church is its practicality.  As its name suggests, there is a methodical streak in its mission and its traditions, which impels its members to move with the times.

When Hugh Price Hughes’ Forward Movement prompted Methodists to attend to social care alongside individual faith, the Sheffield Wesleyan congregation looked at the four city-centre chapels and promptly knocked one down.

The Wesley Chapel, opened in 1780 by John Wesley himself, had become out-of-date and unsuitable for the church’s needs, so it was closed in 1906 and replaced by the magnificent Victoria Hall two years later.

Although £6,000 had been spent on refurbishing Wesley Chapel in 1875, its replacement cost £40,000 and the debt was cleared within three years.

The original design was by the short-lived Manchester practice of Waddington Son & Dunkerley, modified and completed by the Sheffield architect William John Hale (1862-1929).  The finished building is imposing, with an assertive façade and a huge tower with a baroque turret, built of brick and embellished with carvings by the brothers Alfred and William Tory.  When it was built it rivalled the other tall buildings in the city centre, the two town halls and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches which are now both cathedrals.

Its main hall had three levels:  visitors entered from the street at circle level;  the floor of the hall was in the basement, and there was a balcony.  It was the best concert venue in Sheffield until the City Hall opened in 1932;  there are those that say it still is.  Significantly, the Hall was designed with spaces to serve a range of functions.

The first minister, Rev George McNeal (1874-1934), was recruited from the hugely successful Manchester and Salford Mission, and at the inauguration he made a landmark proclamation of intent. 

The Victoria Hall was to be –

  • a great evangelical preaching centre
  • the headquarters of a strong, vigorous and active Mission Church
  • a house of mercy in the centre of the city with an ever-open door
  • a people’s home, the social and religious centre of their thought and activity
  • a rallying ground for all kinds of philanthropic and religious enterprise in the city

His declared aim was to create “a brighter, purer and happier Sheffield”.  Immediately – and for long after Rev McNeal moved in 1924 – the Sheffield Mission responded practically to the needs of local people.

He founded the Sheffield Mission Labour Yard near the Wicker which provided 5,903 days’ work to unemployed men by June 1909, chopping firewood, cleaning, whitewashing.

During the First World War the Hall offered a transient refuge for forces personnel travelling through the city.

Three days after the first night of the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940, the Victoria Hall staged a scheduled performance of Handel’s Messiah, though almost all the surrounding buildings were wrecked.

From May 1941 to the end of the Second World War the Hall ran a Forces’ Rest Hostel which provided food and shelter to 80,000 servicemen trapped overnight by erratic train services.

Eventually the carefully designed and expensively built Victoria Hall became outdated.  Congregations dwindled so the place was taken apart.  In 1965-66 a floor was inserted in the main hall at circle level to create a separate space in the basement, while maintaining capacity for large audiences and congregations on special occasions.

Five shops were inserted into the building on Chapel Walk, providing scope either for commercial rent or mission activity.

In 2003 Ablett Architects designed a refurbishment to the shops that harmonises better with the Edwardian original.

And yet again, in 2015, The Foundry Sheffield, which leases the building from the Methodist Church, is refurbishing and repurposing the Victoria Hall while joining the newly founded Sheffield Charitable Network.

Forward movement

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Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London [© Gt-man]

Hugh Price Hughes (1857-1902) – Methodist preacher, orator, founder of The Methodist Times newspaper and leader of the influential West London Mission – realised that a substantial underclass of needy people were unwilling to go to church and therefore cut off from support which could improve their lives.

He wanted to steer Nonconformists away from a preoccupation with individual salvation towards practical efforts to make poor people’s lives better.

People who only owned one set of clothes were disinclined to mix with those who had a “Sunday best” outfit, and those who avoided religious services often assumed that churches and chapels were populated by snobs and hypocrites.

Supported by the Hull flour-miller Joseph Rank (1854-1943), Hughes initiated the “Forward Movement” to establish city- and town-centre Methodist missions that didn’t look like churches from the outside and felt like theatres or concert halls within – auditoria with facilities for music, variety performances and eventually films that could equally serve for worship and entertainment.

These “Central Halls” became ubiquitous in late-Victorian Britain:  DMBI: A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland. 

The most magnificent of all was the Westminster Central Hall, built in a baroque style that distinguishes it from the gothic Abbey which stands directly opposite.  It is a more modern building than it looks, constructed around a reinforced concrete frame, with a huge domed ceiling above the 2,300-seat central space.

It was designed by Edwin Alfred Rickards FRIBA (1872–1920) and was constructed 1905-11 at a cost of just over a million pounds.

It replaced the disreputable Royal Aquarium (built 1876;  demolished 1903) where, according to Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson’s Lost Theatres of London (1968), “unaccompanied ladies promenaded through the hall in search of male companionship”, and the slightly less risqué Imperial Theatre (demolished 1907).

The Methodist Central Hall was the venue for the inaugural meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, during which the congregation worshipped at the Coliseum Theatre adjacent to Trafalgar Square.

There were expressions of Methodist disapproval when the Hall applied for a licence to sell alcohol in 2005.

Nevertheless, the Central Hall is true to its founder’s mission, combining regular worship with an energetic contribution to public life.

Manchester Oxford Road station

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Oxford Road Station, Manchester

I must have travelled through, or changed trains at, Manchester Oxford Road station hundreds of times since my university days, but although I was conscious of its curious architecture I never got round to photographing it until recently.

Its laminated timber arches bear a passing resemblance to the Sydney Opera House (which is pre-cast concrete).  There’s nothing else quite like it in the British railway system.

The line through Oxford Road has been a vital transport link and a notorious bottleneck from its opening in 1849 to the present day.

It was constructed by the Manchester, South Junction & Altrincham Railway to connect the developing railways south and east of Manchester from what is now Manchester Piccadilly (originally London Road) to the west-facing Liverpool & Manchester Railway, as well as extending rail lines into Cheshire.

The “South Junction” is in fact the 1½-mile viaduct that makes that connection.  Though the viaduct carried double track there was only one through platform at Oxford Road, alongside a west-facing terminal stub, and while the station buildings were renewed in 1876 the platform arrangement remained until a further rebuilding in 1903-04.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the MSJ&AR was piggy-in-the-middle to contentious rivals, the London & North Western and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire (later Great Central) railways, and improvements took decades to accomplish, exasperating the millions of passengers who were obliged to put up with its tired facilities.

After 1922 the MSJ&AR was jointly owned by the London Midland & Scottish and the London & North Eastern railways.  Electric multiple-unit trains improved the comfort and speed of the passenger service in 1931, but the station itself remained unmodernised until 1960.

British Railways ultimately had no alternative but to redesign and rebuild the whole station in 1959-60, despite concerns about the structural condition of the 1849 viaduct.

The solution was to build in lightweight laminated timber, hence the adventurous and spectacular conoid shell structure which provides cover without supporting columns on the curved alignment of the trackbed.

It was designed by the British Railways London Midland Region architect, William Robert Headley.  His other designs for the Region, such as Coventry (1959-62) and Stafford (1961-62), are markedly rectilinear, yet he collaborated at Oxford Road with the furniture designer Max Clendinning (1924-2020).  His other laminated timber structure, the porte-cochère at Crewe station (1963) was replaced after twenty years.

Manchester Oxford Road is an attractive, ingenious, practical structure, deservedly listed Grade II.  Unfortunately, like many post-war innovative structures, it has needed repeated renovation.  It was last refurbished in 2004, and will presumably need further treatment in future.

There’s an excellent detailed description of the station at The Wonderful World of Wood (Manchester Oxford Road station, Greater Manchester, UK) – The Beauty of Transport.

Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, Istanbul

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Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, Istanbul, Turkey

© Richard Miles

When my friends Richard and Janet returned from their first trip to Turkey they had, as usual, lots of travellers’ tales and a couple of phones full of images.

One building they described attracted my attention particularly – the Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, a magnificently Baroque confection looking out over the Golden Horn, the river estuary that makes the shape of a horn as it drains into the Bosphorus.

St Stephen’s is fallaciously described in tourist literature as “the world’s only iron church”, when it may be the only iron and steel prefabricated Orthodox church in the world, an epithet which in no way diminishes its charm or significance.

Under the Ottoman Empire Christian congregations were classified as Greek or Armenian, and the Bulgarian congregation of Constantinople was administered by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy.  The Bulgarians persistently asserted their separate identity, objecting to the imposition of the Greek language in their schools and churches. 

The Bulgarian-born Ottoman statesman Stefan Bogoridi (1775- or 1780-1859) gave a wooden house in the district of Balat for use as a church in 1849.  Replacing it with a purpose-built stone structure proved impossible because of the unstable ground, so when it eventually burnt down it was replaced by a lightweight steel-framed iron church.

Iron churches had been manufactured from the early nineteenth century.  The Liverpool ironmaster John Cragg (1767-1854) used designs by the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) to market architectural components for prefabricated churches from 1812 onwards:  in Liverpool St George’s, Everton and St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth remain, and a third, St Philip’s, Hardman Street, came to light when the building that had enveloped it was demolished.

Architectural iron and steel technology was revolutionised during the nineteenth century.  Even after Bessemer steel became available in the 1850s, wrought iron remained the dominant material in building construction.  Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889) were both built of iron.  The first major steel structure in the world was the Forth Bridge (1890).

There was a short period when iron was employed to clad lightweight steel structures, before the steel-frame construction developed by the Chicago School of architects meant that buildings of any height were not dependent on the weight-bearing capacity of the walls, so the exterior could be clad in any weather-proof material.

The Bulgarian Church in Istanbul is arguably the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century iron churches.  It was designed by the Ottoman-Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur (1854-1935) and the highly detailed exterior was manufactured by the Viennese Rudolph Philip Waagner Company, which was responsible a century later for the Reichstag Dome (1999) and the Great Court of the British Museum (2000).

Only the iconostasis, the screen that partitions the east end of the interior, is wooden:  it was the work of the painter Klavdy Lebedev (1852-1916).  The 131-feet-high tower contains six bells cast in the Russian city of Yaroslavi. 

St Stephen’s was inaugurated on September 8th 1898. 

Its contemporaries include the San Sebastian Church, Manila, (1891) built primarily to resist earthquakes, and St Louis’ Cathedral, Fort-de-France, Martinique (1895) built to resist also to survive hurricanes and fires like that which destroyed its predecessor.

All these buildings are beautiful and fascinating, and Istanbul’s Bulgarian Church deserves a visit alongside the city’s first-order experiences of seeing Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

Great Court

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British Museum, London: Great Court

The British Museum is an all-encompassing treasure house that has collected art and artefacts since its inception in 1753.  It has eight million individual items from all over the world but the one experience that always takes my breath away is the light, spacious, uncompromisingly modern space that is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened by Her Majesty in December 2000.

The Museum’s acquisitiveness has repeatedly overstuffed its premises and sections of the collections have been hived off to create other celebrated London museums and galleries – the National Gallery (1824), the Natural History Museum (1881) and the British Library at St Pancras (1997).

When the late seventeenth-century Old Montagu House, its original home, could take no more contents the architect Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867) designed a neoclassical structure around a quadrangle, which was constructed between 1823 and 1852.

For its day, it was an ideal base for a national museum with a worldwide collection, but as the inexorable pressure of acquisitions mounted, the central courtyard would sooner or later have to be sacrificed.

In particular, King George IV’s 1823 donation of most of his father George III’s library, added to his grandfather George II’s original 1757 bequest of his Old Royal Library, came with Parliamentary confirmation that the British Museum should act as a legal deposit library, entitled to a copy of every book published in the country.  That’s a lot of books.

After thirty years, Sir Robert Smirke’s younger brother, Sydney Smirke (1797-1877), was commissioned to create the Round Reading Room (1854-57) in the courtyard, and the spaces between his circular bookshelves and the inner walls of his brother’s buildings were filled with three storeys of iron bookstacks which eventually extended to twenty-five miles of shelving.  There were table spaces for 302 readers at a time.

This celebrated, much-loved space was the birthplace of the works of a pantheon of writers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Ghandi, Rudyard Kipling to Virginia Woolf.  Vladimir Lenin signed in under the name Jacob Richter, as if he’d got something to hide.

Indeed the Reading Room dome recalls the Pantheon in Rome, though it’s actually a couple of feet smaller (140 feet).  Its ceiling is made of papier-mâché suspended from the structural cast-iron shell.

The British Museum’s library collections were transferred in 1997 to the new British Library at St Pancras, designed by Colin St John Wilson (1922-2007) and his wife M J Long (1939-2008), leaving the Reading Room without a purpose.

The architects Foster & Partners developed a 1970s scheme by Colin St John Wilson to clear the surrounding clutter of stacks and other structures to create a circulation space serving the entire site.

This required ingenuity, because the Reading Room didn’t have walls:  the bookshelves that readers knew actually backed on to the stacks.

A plain white wall now embraces Sydney Smirke’s great study space, which has been restored and was used first for exhibitions and later as the home of the Museum’s archive.

Brief public tours of the Reading Room have been restarted.  Pre-booking is required and photography is not allowed:  Visit | British Museum.

The pièce de resistance, a triumph of late twentieth-century architecture and engineering, is the tessellated glass roof of the Great Court, designed and fabricated by the Austrian manufacturer Waagner-Biro, which had completed the Reichstag Dome in Berlin in 1999.

The Great Court is light, airy and relaxing, with space to sit down and enjoy refreshments from the café.

It’s London’s answer to I M Pei’s Louvre Pyramid.

Churnet Valley Railway

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Churnet Valley Railway, Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire
Churnet Valley Railway: Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire

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:  Events 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:  Steam Train Dining Experiences – Churnet Valley Railway.

This is a heritage railway that’s going places.

Caldon Canal

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Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire
Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire

Whether you walk, cycle or cruise, the eighteen-mile Caldon Canal is an ideal connector between interesting places between Etruria, on the northern edge of Stoke-on-Trent, where Josiah Wedgwood established his famous pottery, and the depths of the little-known Churnet Valley, hidden from the noisy pleasures of the Alton Towers theme park.

The canal is practically a branch of the Trent & Mersey Canal, which financed its construction, climbing from Etruria to a summit level at Stockton Brook and then following the River Churnet to its terminus at Froghall within reach of the quarries at Cauldon.

It opened in 1778 and was quickly connected to numerous quarry tramroads, adding to the traffic on the main line of the Trent & Mersey, which became so heavily-used that water-supply problems caused intolerable hold-ups.

The canal company needed the support of landowners and townspeople around the market town of Leek in order to build an additional reservoir at Rudyard, so the three-mile-long Leek branch (1800-01) acted as a feeder for traffic as well as water.

A further waterway, the Uttoxeter Canal (opened in 1811), continued from Froghall through Oakamoor and past Alton Towers to Rocester and Uttoxeter.  The canal had a dedicated wharf to bring building materials for the Earl of Shrewsbury’s vast house and landscape garden.  A proposed further extension from Uttoxeter to Ashbourne remained unbuilt.

The Trent & Mersey Canal was sold, along with the Caldon Branch, to the North Staffordshire Railway in 1845, and the railway company saw potential in using waterways as feeders to their operations. 

The NSR closed the Uttoxeter Canal in 1849 in order to use the route for the track of the Churnet Valley Railway, and though canal traffic declined towards the end of the nineteenth century between Froghall, Leek and the railway, the waterway never actually closed.

However, it became practically unnavigable by the 1950s, and it was rescued by the Inland Waterways Association’s collaboration with Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council.  The main line to Froghall was reopened in 1974, followed by all but the last half-mile of the Leek Branch.

A particularly interesting walkable section of the Caldon Canal starting from Cheddleton Station southwards includes a length where the canal runs into the River Churnet, simply because there is insufficient room in the narrow valley to accommodate both waterways.

The canal and river separate at Consall, where the remains of the eighteenth-century limekilns are a reminder that this was an industrial area dependent on water for transportation. 

The canalside Black Lion pub [Black Lion, Consall Forge – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale] is a welcome opportunity to rest and, if the timing’s right, it’s possible to return to Cheddleton from the picturesque station on the Churnet Valley Railway.

Detailed information about the places of interest along the canal is at The Ultimate Guide to the Caldon Canal – Leek branch – Black Prince.