Britannia Inn, Worksop Road, Attercliffe Sheffield (2010)
I’ve led A Walk Round Attercliffe every year since 2017, only missing 2020 because of the pandemic lockdown.
These walks are part of the Heritage Open Days event programme and take place on a September weekday, usually Friday, including visits to St Charles BorromeoRoman Catholic Church, the former Sheffield & Hallamshire Bank (now a running shop) and the Zion Graveyard.
As a result, each year there’s a substantial waiting-list. For health-and-safety reasons these walks are limited to 25 participants, and in 2025 I had a waiting list of fifty disappointed people. I run only one Heritage Open Days Walk Round Attercliffe a year because I need to maintain goodwill with the sites that open up for us specially.
It’s become obvious that I should devise a version of the walk suitable for Sunday afternoons, and because the church and the running shop are unavailable, I include a visit to the Zion Graveyard and a comfort stop, with hot and cold drinks and cake available, at the Don Valley Hotel, formerly the Coach & Horses pub, opened in 1901.
The pilot Sunday-afternoon Walk Round Attercliffe was fully booked and took place on April 26th 2026. There was yet another waiting list, so I’ve arranged a follow-up tour on Sunday June 7th 2026, starting at 2.00pm at the Attercliffe tram stop. Wheelchair users are very welcome to join. There’s an accessible entrance to the Zion Graveyard.
I grew up in Attercliffe in the 1950s, and I understand why there’s such a level of interest in the memory of the grimy community that surrounded the steel works. There are plenty of people still alive who were brought up in the terraced houses and went to the huge Victorian board schools, and the following generations who’ve heard the ancestral stories are curious to understand the profound changes that continue to take place.
The Lower Don Valley was the powerhouse of Sheffield’s heavy steel industry and Attercliffe was where its workers lived. Though many buildings have disappeared what remains is a fascinating insight into the life of a once-thriving community, and there are countless stories located in the Valley, from the inventor Benjamin Huntsman to the comedian Charlie Williams.
When George and Richard Cadbury took over their father John’s growing chocolate and cocoa business in 1861 their factory was located in the centre of Birmingham. As the business grew they needed to expand, and in 1879 they relocated four miles to the south to a rural site which they named “Bournville”, tying the name of a local watercourse, The Bourn, with the French epithet ville.
The choice of site was practical: it was farmland with easy access to the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and the Birmingham West Suburban Railway which was opened in phases between 1876 and 1885, that enabled bulk freight to reach the factory avoiding the traffic of central Birmingham.
This was no innovation. Sir Titus Salt had already moved his alpaca mill from the centre of Bradford to a greenfield site he called “Saltaire” and constructed a village of high-quality workers’ housing between 1851 and 1871.
Yet the Cadburys had higher ideals: Saltaire is attractive yet its rectilinear layout is distinctly urban; Bournville was, from the outset, intended to be a garden village. In 1893 George Cadbury bought an initial 120 acres of additional land adjoining the factory to start a development that ultimately reached 1,000 acres accommodating a population of 23,000 in 7,800 homes.
Bournville housing was from the start available to any prospective occupants, irrespective of whether they were Cadbury employees, and the houses were let on 999-year leases, rather than rented. The leasehold policy enabled the Bournville Building Estate to retain control of the village environment with the purpose of “maintaining the rural appearance of the district”. At the same time, the financial structure of the scheme was intended to make it practically self-supporting and independent of the fortunes of the Cadbury business.
The Estate Architect, twenty-year-old William Alexander Harvey, had supervision of all design and construction – indeed, he appears to have done most of the designing himself. The master-specification for the dwellings stipulated a fixed bath and a spacious garden. Each house had, by the terms of the lease, to cost at least £150, and 50% mortgages were available at 2½% interest over fifteen years. Within three years some less scrupulous occupiers were selling their leases at profits of over 30%. Subsequent housing was constructed over the following few years for rent, apparently to cater for workers who could not or would not take on the financial commitment required by the original scheme.
A further group of potential inhabitants were served by Richard Cadbury’s Bournville Almshouse Trust, which built in 1897 dwellings for pensioners, again not necessarily from the family firm, financed by the rentals of thirty-five adjacent houses let to ordinary tenants. The architect for this attractive courtyard-development was Ewan Harper.
George Cadbury made over the whole of his Bournville Building Estate to a further charity, the Bournville Village Trust, in 1900, initially endowed with 313 dwellings on a total of 330 acres with the expressed intention “to ameliorate the conditions of the labouring classes, in Birmingham and elsewhere in Great Britain…by the provision of improved dwellings”.
To the present day Bournville bears the stamp of its Quaker founder. It has a strong community base which maintains George Cadbury’s teetotal principles: in 2007 the local population saw off Tesco’s application for a drinks licence for its nearby convenience store.
The extensive sporting facilities include playing fields at Rowheath, west of the village, and near to the chocolate factory the Bournville Baths designed by G H Lewin (1902-4), described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, in The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (Penguin 1966), as “the most impressive architectural extravaganza on the whole estate”.
The centre of the village – now the visitor centre – is the Rest House (W Alexander Harvey 1913), commemorating George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s silver wedding and based on the Yarn Market at Dunster, Somerset. Nearby stand two rescued fourteenth-century timber houses, Selly Manor House and Minworth Greaves Manor, from the city centre.
There are several educational facilities – Ruskin Hall, the village institute (W Alexander Harvey 1902-5, extended 1928, 1956 and 1966), the Junior School (Harvey 1905) and Infants’ School (Harvey 1910)and the Day Continuation Schools (John Ramsay Armstrong 1925) – and several places of worship – the Friends’ Meeting House (W Alexander Harvey 1905), the Anglican Church ofSt Francis of Assisi (W Alexander Harvey & H G Wicks 1924-5) and the Saint Prince Lazar Serbian Orthodox Church (Dragomir Tadić 1968).
And it has a Carillon, originally dating from 1906, enlarged in 1923 and completely reconstructed in 1934.
Green Lane Works gateway rear view, Kelham Island, Sheffield
There has been an island close to the centre of Sheffield since the twelfth century when the town’s corn mill was built. The goyt carrying water to this mill left the River Don below the present-day Ball Street Bridge and ran parallel to the river until it reached Lady’s Bridge, the main river-crossing for traffic north into Yorkshire. The land in between was known for centuries simply as “the Isle” or “the Island”, and there’s a reference to the Isle as late as 1795.
The upstream area of the island may have acquired its name from the town armourer in the seventeenth century, Kellam Homer, who operated the Kelham Wheel by 1637.
Fairbanks’ maps of 1771 and 1795 clearly show that the surrounding area was still agricultural in the late-eighteenth century – the Duke of Norfolk’s nurseries were located at the present-day Nursery Street – but the River Don’s usefulness to industry quickly changed the townscape. Water- and steam-powered works, along with workers’ housing, filled the area in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Not all these works were processing metal. Another street-name, Cotton Mill Row, indicates a factory which was converted into a workhouse for six hundred inmates in 1829. It was prone to overcrowding and repeatedly extended until it was replaced with the Firvale Workhouse (now part of the Northern General Hospital) in 1880.
The Sheffield Corporation Tramways Power Station was adjacent to the river and survives as the Kelham Island Museum, illustrating the industrial and social history of Sheffield.
Tucked away by the riverside, Kelham Island played a significant role in the city’s development, and its recent redevelopment as a desirable place to live, thrive and be entertained has drawn attention to its historic interest.
The maxim “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was popularised by John Wesley in his sermon ‘On Dress’ in 1791, but it was hardly a practical possibility for ordinary people until the soap tax was abolished in 1853 and manufacturers produced inexpensive soaps for washing people, clothes and households.
One of these was William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) who revolutionised the retailing of soap and made a vast fortune through ‘Sunlight’, the first brand to eliminate the use of silicate of soda and to reduce the proportion of tallow oil in favour of vegetable oil.
He and his brother James Darcy Lever (1854-1910) opened their Warrington factory in 1886 to produce their paper-wrapped, lemon-scented ‘Sunlight’ brand, initially with the ponderous slogan “Sunlight Self-Washer Soap: See How This Becomes The House”
Stung by his bankers’ refusal to underwrite a new factory in Warrington, William Lever resolved to build on an unpromising marshy site at Bromborough Pool on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey advantageously located between the river and the railway.
Lever noticed that the enlightened Price’s Patent Candle Company had established a workers’ village at Bromborough Pool in 1853, and he aspired to provide his workers with the benefit of high-quality rented housing and open spaces like Edward Akroyd’s Copley (1849) and Akroyden (1859, Sir Titus Salt’s Saltaire (1859) and George & Richard Cadbury’s Bournville (1879).
The initial building-programme for what became Port Sunlight extended to approximately 56 acres, 24 of which were for the factory (completed 1889) and its associated transport links, and the other 32 were for the start of the workers’ village. William Lever regarded his company housing as a means of “sharing prosperity”, though not sharing profits.
The Warrington architect, William Owen (1846-1910), was responsible for filling in a series of tidal inlets to create the site. He designed many of the houses built from 1889 onwards and the public buildings which nurtured the village community. Gladstone Hall (William Owen 1891) was initially a men’s dining room and Hulme Hall (William & Segar Owen 1900-1) was the corresponding women’s dining hall, commemorating Lady Lever’s maiden name. The original scheme, which now forms the south-western portion of the existing village, was completed in 1897.
As a result of William Lever’s reflections during his round-the-world voyage in 1892, the site was extended to approximately 130 acres, bounded by the factory to the south, the railway to the west, the Bebington Road to the north and the New Chester Road to the east. By 1900 over four hundred houses had been completed. The Bridge Inn (Grayson & Ould 1900) – named after the now-buried Victoria Bridge across the filled-in creek – was built as a temperance hostelry but licensed (against William Lever’s principles, but with his consent) from 1903.
He outlined his vision for his factory village in an address to the International Housing Conference visit in 1907:
…building…ten to twelve houses to the acre is the maximum that ought to be allowed…Houses should be built a minimum of fifteen feet from the roadway…every house should have space available in the rear for [a] vegetable garden. Open spaces for recreation should be laid out at frequent and convenient centres…A home requires a greensward and garden in front of it, just as much as a cup requires a saucer.
Lever was astute in employing a small number of regular architects – William Owen of Warrington, John Douglas of Chester and Douglas’ pupil Edward A L Ould – yet also enlisted other architects of local and national calibre for smaller commissions, including Sir Ernest George, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor Charles H Reilly.
Two standard housing templates were used – the Kitchen Cottage (consisting of kitchen, scullery, larder and three bedrooms) and the Parlour Cottage (an enlarged version of the Kitchen Cottage with a parlour and additional bedroom). All had an outside WC and – unusually for the period – a bath, either covered in the scullery or in a separate ground-floor bathroom.
In 1910 an architectural competition was held to complete the layout: it was won by Ernest Prestwich (1889-1977), then a third-year student at the Liverpool School of Architecture. His formal scheme set out The Diamond, a wide boulevard running north-south, crossed by The Causeway, aligned on Christ Church, which had been completed in 1904.
By the time Lord Leverhulme died in 1925, 890 houses had been completed in Port Sunlight, most of them before 1911. Some further construction took place between the wars, up to the building of Jubilee Crescent in 1938, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the factory.
The Museum of Cider in Hereford is outstanding, with skilful interpretive material and a rich collection of objects. It was educational in the best sense – interesting and fun.
It stands on the site of Henry Percival Bulmer’s first cider-making factory dating from 1888. Two of the Museum’s founders, Bertram Bulmer and Norman Weston, belonged to cider families, and teamed up with the Director of Long Ashton Research Station, John Hudson, to begin a far-sighted project, the Hereford Cider Museum Trust, in 1973 to rescue evidence of the history of their industry.
They spent a decade building the Archive of Cider Pomology, collecting oral-history and moving-image records of processes that were going out of use, gathering artefacts and surveying the remaining sites connected with the farming of apples and the manufacture of cider and other fruit-based drinks.
Bertram Bulmer had a flair for public relations. He took advantage of the fact that the factory was rail-connected to create Bulmer’s Cider Train. At a time when British Railways was desperate to eliminate steam locomotives on their lines, Bertram Bulmer bought five redundant Pullman coaches and leased the locomotive 6000 King George V from Swindon Borough Council to operate a mobile exhibition train from 1968 to 1987.
The Cider Museum opened to the public in 1981, showing how apples are processed from orchard to bottle. It’s a complicated process, first encouraged in the seventeenth century by John, 1st Viscount Scudamore (1601-1671). When the apples are harvested, they are scratted (pressed) in a mill to a pulp, which is sandwiched between layers of sweet straw and squeezed to extract the juice. Yeast is introduced into the juice either in an open vat or a closed cask for three months to three years, ready for bottling.
All this and much more is shown in the Museum by exhibits, illustrations and copious readable interpretative displays.
The range of ciders is vast: blending cider from different types of apple gives a wide variety of colour and taste; sparkling versions are created by a version of the méthode champenoise; adding liqueur to cider makes cider brandy. Cider made with pears is called perry, of which the best known is Babycham, devised by the Somerset brewer, Thomas Showering.
The popularity of cider as an alternative to beer had a profound effect on the local economy. Farmers found it profitable to maintain their orchards rather than grow arable crops or raise livestock. Industrialisation and rail transport enabled the cider-makers to develop markets in the growing towns and cities of the nineteenth century.
The Museum displays a wealth of art and artefacts – illustrations, advertisements, labels, bottles, glassware. There is a gallery of framed illustrations from the rare Herefordshire Pomona, a catalogue of 441 watercolours by Alice Blanche Ellis and Edith Elizabeth Bull (1878-85): HOGG, ROBERT,, The Herefordshire Pomona..
The visitor route begins at a huge seventeenth-century horse-powered circular French cider mill and a mobile cider press. There’s a cooperage, casks of all sizes and a fermentation vessel, displays of bottling and capping machinery and an abundance of bottles.
Although the Museum is located in Hereford it reaches out to the other cider-producing areas of England – the Three Counties (Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire) and the South-west (Somerset, Devon and Cornwall).
I chose not to sample the cider, and it’s too heavy to carry on a train, but the coffee was excellent, served in a cafetière with a Dorset apple cake which signals that the place isn’t parochial.
The Museum of Cider is well worth two or three hours, something to eat and some means of carting bottles home: Visit Us | Cider Museum.
Monongahela Incline, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
The great steel city of Pittsburgh is built at the confluence of two rivers with Native American names – the Monongahela and the Allegheny.
The south bank of the Monongahela is precipitous and coal-bearing, useful for supplying the expanding industries but impractical for residential development until engineers adapted mining technology to construct what Americans call “inclines”, steep cable-hauled lifts for both passengers and freight.
The two survivors – located almost a mile apart – are the Monongahela (1870) and Duquesne (1877) Inclines. They were both included in the National Register of Historic Places and designated Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmarks in the 1970s and serve the convenience of local residents as well as giving benefit to tourists seeking a spectacular view of the city’s central business district, the Golden Triangle.
The two Castle Shannon Inclines (1890/1892) originated from coalmining infrastructure but most were purpose-built, often encouraged by German-Americans who remembered the stanseilbahnen [cable railways] in their native country.
The Monongahela Incline was designed by the Prussian-born engineer John J Endres, assisted by his daughter Caroline (1846-1930) who is regarded as the first female engineer in the USA, and who married her father’s Hungarian-born assistant, Samuel Diescher (1839-1915). She designed the Mount Oliver Incline (1871) and he was responsible for at least eight of the other Pittsburgh inclines, including the Duquesne Incline.
Both the surviving inclines served freight. John Endres and Samuel Diescher designed a separate Monongahela Freight Incline on 10ft-gauge track. It opened in 1880 and operated until road improvements rendered it redundant. It closed in 1935 and its track-bed is visible alongside the existing passenger track.
Visitors to Pittsburgh find the Monogahela Incline easier to reach, across the Smithfield Bridge from downtown and past the Station Square shopping centre. It’s adjacent to the Light Rapid Transit station at Station Square: Welcome to the Monongahela Incline’s Flowpage.
The Duquesne Incline was rescued in 1963 by what became the Society for the Preservation of the Duquesne Heights Incline and has been restored back to its original condition: Official site of the Duquesne Incline.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
There are two moving-image clips showing wagon-hoists in action, both filmed in Sheffield One sequence, apparently dated 1966, lacks a title or credits: Sheffields railway in the 60`s – YouTube (start at 5:12). A fully finished British Transport Films documentary in colour includes footage of a hoist at the former London & North Western Railway’s City Goods depot at Wharf Street: Vintage railway film – Freight and a city – 1966 (start at 7:04).
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, 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.
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