Flicks in the sticks

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The Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

The Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

Photo:  Janet Miles

The March/April 2012 edition of the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin mentions the then forthcoming ninetieth anniversary of the Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa – one of the most eccentric and evocative film-going experiences in England.

The Pavilion Cinema opened in a converted cricket pavilion in 1922 and only later became known as the Kinema-in-the-Woods.  It has always retained the original Greek spelling, derived from the word for ‘motion’.

The building started out as a cricket pavilion, and because the roof supports are integral to the structure, films have always been shown by back-projection of surprising clarity.

According to a 1937 advertisement, “while furnished with comfortable plush seats, deck chairs and cushions are provided for those who appreciate them”.  The deck chairs on the front six rows were priced at 1s 6d, threepence dearer than the best fixed seats in the house.

The Kinema was operated for half a century by its founder, Major C C Allport:  when he applied for his fiftieth licence in 1972 the magistrates waived the fee.

By the 1980s it had become a precious survival, and its next owner, James Green, installed the Compton organ from the Super Cinema, Charing Cross Road, to provide concerts in addition to current-release movies.  Its console is mounted on the lift from the former Regent Cinema, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent.

Now there is a second screen, Kinema Too, opened in 1994, to complement the original auditorium and offer a wider variety of films.

Woodhall Spa is an unlikely spot to see first-release movies.  But after all, Woodhall Spa is an unlikely spot.

The history of the Kinema-in-the-Woods can be found in Edward Roy Mayor, The Kinema in the Woods: the story of Woodhall Spa’s unique cinema (J W Green Cinemas 2002) and at http://www.thekinemainthewoods.co.uk/history.

 

Eat your way round Woodhall Spa

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Petwood, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

Petwood, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

There is no shortage of places to eat and drink in Woodhall Spa – the Dower House Hotel [http://www.dowerhousehotel.co.uk], the Golf Hotel [http://www.thegolf-hotel.com/default.htm] and the Woodhall Spa Hotel (formerly the Eagle Lodge)[http://www.legacy-hotels.co.uk/legacy-woodhall/index.php].

The most historically interesting of them all is the mock-Tudor Petwood [http://www.petwood.co.uk], built by the Baroness Grace Von Eckhardstein, daughter of the furniture-store owner Sir John Blundell Maple in 1905.

In 1910, she divorced her German husband and married Captain Archibald Weigall, grandson of the eleventh Earl of Westmorland, who served as land agent for the Earl of Londesborough’s nearby Blankney estate.

The following year they commissioned the London architect Frank Peck to extend Petwood, building a staff wing to the east on what the Horncastle News described as “an enormous scale”.

Peck’s carefully stylised modifications give this wholly twentieth-century house a “borrowed history”, suggesting a series of additions through the Tudor and Jacobean periods.  The main staircase, often attributed to Maples carpenters, is more likely the work of Peck’s foreman-carver James Wylie.  At an unknown later date – but probably not much later – the grandiose two-storey oriel-windowed entrance bay was added.

Also, mainly during 1913-4, Harold Peto was employed to design the ambitious gardens.

In 1933 Petwood became a hotel, and during the Second World War this was the officers’ mess for 617 Squadron, the “Dam Busters”.

Now, it’s an exceptionally relaxing place to eat, drink or stay.  Indeed, you could spend a very satisfactory weekend staying at any one of the Dower House, the Golf, Petwood or the Woodhall Spa, and wandering off to have coffee, tea or a meal at each of the others.

And you could take home a picnic from the Bakery & Delicatessen at 14 Broadway (01526-352183):  they’re far too busy selling superb food to bother with a website.

The history of Petwood, successively as a house and a hotel, is detailed and illustrated in Edward Mayor, Petwood:  the remarkable story of a famous Lincolnshire hotel (Petwood 2000).

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Unlikely place for a spa

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Memorial to 617 Squadron, "The Dambusters", Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

Memorial to 617 Squadron, “The Dambusters”, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

The sleepy Lincolnshire resort of Woodhall Spa owes its origins to coal – or rather the absence of coal.

The concealed coalfield in the east of Nottinghamshire developed only as far as the River Trent, east of which the coal measures dipped inaccessibly far underground.

A land agent called Edward Bogg, however, believing that the presence of oil shales in the Bain valley indicated the presence of coal, dug a hundred-yard trial shaft near Kirkstead, barely a mile south of the later spa, in 1819. 

Another local land agent, John Parkinson of Bolingbroke, began an exploratory shaft that reached four hundred yards down without reaching the coal measures.  Local legend says that the sinkers took coal down the shaft to “seed” the workings, in order to perpetuate their employment.

Subsequently, the water that flooded this abandoned shaft was found to contain six times more iodine and bromine than any known British mineral water, and in 1839 the lord of the manor, Thomas Hotchkin, installed a brick-lined well and a steam pumping-engine, opened a pump room and bath-house, and built the Victoria Hotel.  All this cost nearly £30,000.

The little community that grew around Hotchkin’s enterprise took the name Woodhall Spa.  Its publicity labelled it “the English Kreuznach”;  a local newspaper termed it the “Modern Bethesda”.

The Lincoln-Boston railway, opened in 1848, passed nearby at Kirkstead;  the branch to Horncastle, opened in 1855, brought a station to the spa with a level crossing cutting diagonally across the main street.

A syndicate of entrepreneurs set out to develop the place in the 1880s, and reported visitor numbers increased dramatically from 15,182 in 1886 to 47,700 within three years.

However, Kelly’s Directory of 1892 comments, “The numerous baths and dressing-rooms more than suffice to meet immediate wants…”

In time, golf became more important as a visitor attraction than water treatments, and despite the brave advertising efforts of the London & North Eastern Railway [http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/w/woodhall_spa/index.shtml] visitor traffic dwindled and Woodhall  Spa became a dormitory.  The spa itself lingered on until eventually the well collapsed in 1983.

The town’s proudest claim to fame is its association with the celebrated 617 Squadron, the “Dam Busters”, whose poignant memorial commemorates Operation Chastise, their bombing of the Möhne and Edersee Dams on May 16th-17th 1943:  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dambstrajj.gif].

The oddest, and most rewarding visitor attraction in this tiny town is the miniscule corrugated-iron Cottage Museum (brought to its present site in 1887) [http://www.cottagemuseum.co.uk].  It’s worth seeking out.

The community website is at http://www.woodhallspa.org.  For information on 617 Squadron, see http://www.dambusters.org.uk.

 

Dyed in the wool

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Bradford Industrial Museum, Moorside Mills, Eccleshill, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Bradford Industrial Museum, Moorside Mills, Eccleshill, Bradford, West Yorkshire

I once worked for a man who was born and brought up in Bradford.  Though he’d worked among the coal of South Yorkshire and the steel of Sheffield for much of his adult life he was steeped in the traditions of his native city.

He once drew my attention to his habit of always stowing a couple of pins in the inside of his lapel.  I’m assured by a knowledgeable West Yorkshireman that “No man connected with cloth (Huddersfield perhaps rather than Bradford, but perhaps Bradford too) would feel properly dressed to go out without a couple of pins – a sort of ‘just in case’.”

My former boss was born at the beginning of the First World War, and he told me that he was taken by his parents to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924-5 – a remarkable event that deserves an article of its own:  http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/server.php?show=conInformationRecord.86.

He described being taken to an auditorium where he and his parents sat in the second row seats.  The front row was reserved, and after a pause in walked the then Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

The Duke sat directly in front of my boss’s father, who gently reached across the open seat-back to make a discreet examination of the royal suit-cloth.  “Not very good wool,” he remarked to his wife and son.

Nobody knows wool like Bradford people.

Those of us who don’t share the woollen-district heritage can pick up some insight at the excellent Bradford Industrial Museum, which is based at Moorside Mills at Eccleshill (built in 1875 and since much added to).

This is one of the admirable municipal museums that soldiers on through hard times without charging admission.

Here in the textile galleries – if you turn up at the right time – you can observe machinery in operation illustrating the successive processes of combing, drawing, spinning and weaving, with informative operators to answer questions.

You can even feel the fabric at every stage from just off the sheep’s back to finished cloth.

There’s much more to see – the millowner’s residence, stables with horses at work, terraced houses furnished at different periods, a fine collection of Bradford-built Jowett cars, a Bradford trolleybus and the only surviving fully intact Bradford tram.

For details of opening times and what’s on when, see http://www.bradfordmuseums.org/venues/industrialmuseum/index.php.  It’s worth a couple of hours at least.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Air rights

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New York Central Building [now Helmsley Building] and Pan Am Building [now MetLife Building], New York City (1981)

New York Central Building [now Helmsley Building] and Pan Am Building [now MetLife Building], New York City (1981)

I recently came across Meredith L Clausen’s book The Pan Am Building and the shattering of the Modernist dream (Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2005).  It’s obvious from the title that she doesn’t much like the building.  She tells in great detail the story of a Manhattan building that symbolises the over-ambition of financiers seeking to make money out of transport.

This huge Modernist block sits astride the railroad tracks that lie in tunnel beneath Park Avenue, separating Grand Central Terminal (Reed & Stem, Warren & Wetmore 1903-27) from the former New York Central Building, now the Helmsley Building (Warren & Wetmore 1929).

Emery Roth’s original design, which would not have interrupted the Park Avenue vista, was altered, enlarged and turned 90° by Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius, who proposed, unsuccessfully, to demolish the New York Central Building to create a public park.

The development was commissioned by the New York Central Railroad in a desperate attempt to shore up their finances as traffic leached from rail to air.  The building reeks with irony, a hubristic symbol of the age of air-travel, no longer owned by the luckless company that built it.

Completed in 1963, it became the Pan Am Building because it was tenanted by Pan American World Airways, the last company to claim the right to have their logo on the outside of a New York skyscraper.  Initially the airline occupied fifteen floors of offices and ran a booking hall at street level.

The roof of the Pan Am Building was designed as a helicopter landing-pad offering rapid transfer from mid-town to JFK Airport for up to eight passengers at a time.  This grandiose scheme was unpopular from the start for obvious reasons of noise and danger.  Eventually, a fatal accident on May 16th 1977 put a stop to it:  http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR77-09.pdf.

The design is apparently derived from an unbuilt Le Corbusier design and the Pirelli Tower, Milan (Gio Ponti & Pier Lugig Nervi 1959) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirelli_Building].  Its distinctive footprint is repeated in Britain in the 331ft Portland House, Westminster (Howard Fairbairn & Partners 1960-3) [http://postwarbuildings.com/buildings/portland-house], and echoed by the 253ft Taberner House, Croydon (H Thornley 1964-7 – due for demolition) [http://www.croydonsfuture.info/taberner-house.html] and the 656ft Alpha Tower, Birmingham (Richard Seifert & Partners 1969-73) [http://www.birminghamuk.com/alphatower.htm].

Pan American Airways came to grief, driven to bankruptcy in the face of the 1973 oil crisis, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the destruction of Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 and the effect on oil prices of the First Gulf War of 1991.

In 1990, Pan Am gave up their remaining four floors of the building and shortly afterwards the owner, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company changed the name to the MetLife Building and replaced the Pan Am name and logos with their own.

Though the airline ceased to exist in 1991, the Pan Am brand still functions.  It now belongs to a railroad company:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Railways.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

 

Somerset Coal Canal

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Somerset Coal Canal: stop lock at Dundas Aqueduct

Somerset Coal Canal: stop lock at Dundas Aqueduct

At the southern end of Dundas Aqueduct, a branch runs from the Kennet & Avon Canal, through a curious narrow stop-lock.  Nowadays the branch ends abruptly after less than half a mile, at Brassknocker Wharf, where there is an excellent modern restaurant called the Angelfish [http://www.foodanddrinkguides.co.uk/bath/angelfish-restaurant/restaurant/2742].

This is all that remains navigable of the Somerset Coal Canal, a long-forgotten and fascinating piece of canal and railway archaeology.  It was devised by John Rennie (1761-1821), the engineer of the Kennet & Avon Canal, and surveyed by William Jessop (1745-1814) and William ‘Strata’ Smith (1769-1839), whose work is celebrated at the Rotunda Museum, Scarborough.

The original canal was built westwards to Paulton, to tap the potential traffic of the Somerset coalfield.  The first coal was brought out in 1798, though the canal itself fully opened only in 1805.

Bringing barges from the summit level 135 feet higher than the Kennet & Avon required 22 locks.  To reduce the drain on limited supplies of water, the engineer Robert Weldon proposed instead building a caisson lift at Coombe Hay, in a single operation [See http://www.coalcanal.org/history/Rowley/tLev1.htm].

This involved building a series of three 60-foot-deep cisterns, into which each barge would be floated in an airtight container – the caisson – and sunk, emerging at the foot of each lift with no loss of water at all.  [See http://www.coalcanal.org/features/Caisson/Caisson.htm and http://rtjhomepages.users.btopenworld.com/caisson-telegrap.html (which first appeared in The Daily Telegraph)].

An experimental model of this system appeared to work, but the full-sized version was unsuccessful, apparently because of geological rather than mechanical problems.

It was replaced, first by an inclined plane, and eventually – in 1805 – by a flight of locks, from which a steam pump returned water to the summit pound.

A canal branch from Radstock as far as Twinhoe was never completed:  to avoid the expense of a further flight of locks the line was built as a tramway by 1815.  This was superseded in 1875 by the Somerset & Dorset Railway line to Bath.

There was no shortage of coal traffic, but the Somerset Coal Canal was an early victim of railway competition.

Later, the bulk of the main canal between Limpley Stoke and Camerton was converted by the Great Western Railway to a standard-gauge branch-line in 1910.  This was not a commercial success, but after it closed it became the location for the celebrated Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953).

Much of the route of the Somerset Coal Canal is traceable, including the former aqueduct at Dunkerton, for seriously determined explorers to seek out.  The Somerset Coal Canal Society exists to foster interest in the route:  http://www.coalcanal.org.

Of the caisson lift hardly anything remains.  The masonry was used to build the replacement locks, and archaeological digs have revealed very little.

I wonder if there’s a working model somewhere?

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. 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.

Gothic New Zealand: Auckland 2

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Old St Mary's Church, Auckland, New Zealand

Old St Mary’s Church, Auckland, New Zealand

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

The city of Auckland has a special place in the history of the Anglican Church in New Zealand, because it was the base from which Bishop George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878) set up missions across the two islands as the first and only Bishop of New Zealand between 1841 and 1858.

Selwyn, who rowed in the first ever Oxford-Cambridge boat race and after whom Selwyn College is named, was a fellow of St John’s College when the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society, began to promote the idea that a truly Christian building should be built in the Gothic manner.

As Bishop of New Zealand he had to face the fact that masonry architecture was out of reach:  the cost and time involved in building in stone meant that the first New Zealand churches had to be timber.

But they could still be Gothic, and the Anglican community in Auckland outgrew a succession of churches until what is now called Old St Mary’s was begun in 1886 to the ambitious designs of Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898).  Mountfort was a prolific first-generation New Zealand architect, and at St Mary’s he provided all the detail that would be found in a much larger stone-built European cathedral, with a three-sided sanctuary and lancet windows under a generous cat-slide roof.

The largest timber church in the world, it was designated as Auckland’s Anglican Cathedral in 1887 and was completed in 1898.

Its much larger successor, Holy Trinity Cathedral, was begun in 1959 to a reduced version of a twenty-year-old design by Charles Towle that had been stalled by the start of the Second World War.  The choir, transepts and crossing – reminiscent of Sir Edward Maufe’s contemporary Guildford Cathedral in Surrey – were completed in 1973.

The nave, to a much lighter design with a glazed west wall by Richard Toy, was added in 1991-5.  Now a further chapel, to the liturgical east (geographical south) is under way, due to be completed by Christmas 2014, the bicentenary of the arrival of Christianity on the North Island:  http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/digest/index.cfm/2012/5/8/Dramatic-chapel-for-Holy-Trinity.

The conjunction between the two is vibrant:  it’s a very special interior space.  Next door, Old St Mary’s stands – a very different, antique interior – on a new site.  It was transported bodily across the road and turned ninety degrees in 1982.

Update:  Stewart Buckthorp has added a very useful and detailed comment to this article.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

Gothic New Zealand: Auckland 1

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St Stephen's Chapel, Auckland, New Zealand

St Stephen’s Chapel, Auckland, New Zealand

St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand

It’s all too easy to forget how much history is packed into the nineteenth-century outposts of the British empire.  A country like New Zealand grew to maturity within two or three generations, who brought their baggage with them and established a home-from-home in a land that belonged to others.

When I visited Auckland to lecture to the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society, I wanted to see as many nineteenth-century churches as possible for a lecture I’m researching on Antipodean Gothic architecture.  My host Anne Gambrill propelled me in record time to a succession of unexpected treasures.

She took me to the tiny cruciform St Stephen’s Chapel at Judges Bay, no bigger than a modest bungalow, where the original Constitution of the Church of the Province of New Zealand was signed in 1857 – a location I’d probably not have found unassisted.

She also alerted me to St Matthew’s Church in the city-centre, unmistakably a design by the British architect John Loughborough Pearson, who was responsible for Truro Cathedral in England and St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane.

In fact, the design was completed after his death in 1898 by his son Frank Loughborough Pearson.  This tall, chaste, cruciform, stone-vaulted building was completed in 1905, though without the intended spire.

As St Matthew-in-the-City, the parish has a proud record of social activism:  http://www.stmatthews.org.nz.

The mother church of the Catholic diocese of Auckland is the ornate St Patrick’s Cathedral, designed by the Auckland father-and-son practice of Edward (1824/5-1895) and Thomas Mahoney (1855-1923) and completed in 1908.  The third church on the site, St Patrick’s is revered as the base of the original Catholic mission on North Island, led by Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier (1801-1871).

The nineteenth-century development of New Zealand churches – alike in the sense of congregations and buildings – was extremely fast.  An entire heritage of individual endeavour and architectural heritage evolved within the first three generations of Europeans to settle.

And each of those church-building generations, Catholic and Anglican alike, looked back to the home country for the styles and imagery of their places of worship.

The Anglican diocese of Auckland, however, ended up with a more complex and distinctive architectural legacy…

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

2½ miles and six locks to start with

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Ironville Locks, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (1978)

Ironville Locks, Cromford Canal, Derbyshire (1978)

My blog-article about the Cromford Canal caught the attention of Hugh Potter, the Archivist of the Friends of the Cromford Canal, partly because of the 1963 image of the west portal of the Butterley Tunnel, which is no longer recognisable because of the construction of the A61 Ripley by-pass.

Hugh asked what other images I had from that period, and very kindly rescanned them for me to a higher resolution than my scanner can achieve.  They’re now displayed on the Friends’ website at http://www.cromfordcanal.info/archives/mharchive/mh1.htm.

The Friends exists to work towards the entire restoration of the Cromford Canal, including its Pinxton and Lea Wood branches.  This is clearly the work of a generation, at least.

When I pottered around the canal in the 1960s it was virtually intact.  In the time it took me to go through secondary school and university, a great bite was taken out of it at Ambergate to build a gas-processing plant, and other stretches were lost to road improvements and opencast coal working.  The current state of the entire line can be seen at http://www.cromfordcanal.info/images/map_large.jpg.

At the moment, only six hundred yards of the Cromford Canal are accessible from the inland-waterways system:  above the first lock at Langley Mill, a stretch exists as moorings for boats that have travelled up the Erewash Canal.

Beyond that, the course of the canal was obliterated by opencast mining in the 1960s:  six locks and 2½ miles of waterway must be completely rebuilt to connect with the surviving flight of locks to Ironville.

Here, well-intentioned but over-enthusiastic flood prevention works have wrecked the top locks which were, until 1985, virtually intact, though the gates had been removed and concrete cills installed to carry overflow.

What would have been a restoration will now become a major rebuilding.  Now is not the time to expect enormous financial support from outside bodies, but the Friends quietly beaver away reversing the decay and encroachments of nature:  http://www.cromfordcanal.info/restoration/eastern.htm.

It’s the work of volunteers and their determination, for which ‘heroic’ is not too strong an adjective, that kickstarts the recovery of amenities which shouldn’t have been squandered in the first place.

One day, boats will sail again up to Ironville and to Pinxton, and in time through the Butterley Tunnel and on to Cromford.

It worked on the Rochdale and Huddersfield Narrow Canals, and it’s happening on the Chesterfield.

It’s only a matter of time – and timing.

Nine miles to go

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Norwood Locks, Chesterfield Canal, South Yorkshire (1976)

Turnerwood Locks, Chesterfield Canal, South Yorkshire (1976)

My friends Andy and Sue often take their kids, Liam and Daniella, cycling down the Chesterfield Canal on the border of South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.  The stretch near where they live, running from the east end of Norwood Tunnel down the locks to Worksop, is a wonderfully restored, picturesque stretch of waterway.

If you’re lucky somebody might even offer you and your bike a lift on their narrow boat.

When I first saw this stretch of canal in 1976 it was a wreck.

Twenty-six miles of the canal from the River Trent at Stockwith to Worksop had been designated a cruiseway under the 1968 Transport Act, largely because of the campaigning of the Retford & Worksop Boat Club, who not unreasonably wanted to sail their boats between Worksop and Retford and beyond.

The remaining twenty miles from Worksop to Chesterfield, including the Norwood Tunnel (abandoned in 1908), were simply discarded and the locks by which the canal climbs from Worksop up to the tunnel were demolished as a hazard.

Local people and canal enthusiasts disagreed with this, and in 1976 the Chesterfield Canal Society (since 1998 the Chesterfield Canal Trust) began the huge task of bringing the whole canal back to life.

Since then eleven miles, from Chesterfield to Staveley and from Norwood Tunnel to Worksop have been made navigable:  (see http://www.chesterfield-canal-trust.org.uk/index.php/gallery/canal-map).

The next stage will be to restore the still derelict locks on the western section from Staveley up to the tunnel and then, the biggest challenge of all, the tunnel itself, which runs beneath the M1 motorway.

Already the Chesterfield Canal Trust has achieved a great deal, and their activities are constant and enterprising:  http://www.chesterfield-canal-trust.org.uk/index.php/latest-news/general-news.

And Liam and Daniella, both children of the twenty-first century, may find it difficult to believe the contrast between their childhood memories and the archive pictures of only thirty-odd years before.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list includes a section on the Chesterfield Canal and 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.