Grantham Canal - bits of rusty metal and other interesting stuff.

Our zeal was severely tested yesterday in the thick, claggy, sucking mud that has appeared after the weather guessers didn't quite get the weekend forecast right. "Fine and sunny after a light shower" was their forecast guess for Sunday. Wrong!!

After this there are Locks 12 and 13 in the same flight although they appear to be in better condition than this one and the early surveys suggested a lot of the work would be cleaning out the mortar and repointing rather than the demolition and re-building the walls. That said, a fair amount of work will be required e.g. there are weirs at both locks, they require new gates, a new by-wash will have to be built and access is very limited. When work eventually starts on Lock 13, the current worksite at Lock 14 will act as our base, again due to access issues - the adjacent lock-keepers cottage is a listed structure. Our new worksite is considerably larger than Lock 15's which was quite compact by comparison. New access tracks have had to be constructed, and a new by-wash (thanks to WRG) has had to be put in pipes to circumvent the site; there is no convenient ditch as there was at L15. Oh!.. and there's a rather large , and no so friendly bull in the same field as our worksite so a stock-proof fence has had to be erected; let's hope the fence does the job. He's a big lad with attitude!!!

We hope to have the demolition phase completed "soonish" but we have to retain as much of the original as possible in order to respect the heritage aspect as HLF are providing a considerable amount of funding for the project.

@35B, you should be able to see more activity at this site from the old railway track as the lock is closer to the trackbed. Downside, it's further from the Dirty Duck!!

 

I am not sure if this link has appeared in this thread but here is the railway side. I wanted to go through the whole thread to check but got distracted looking again at the pictures. Follow this link to while away 20 minutes reading about the history of the Woolsthorpe branch

http://www.tracksthroughgrantham.uk...railways-rediscovered/the-woolsthorpe-branch/

 

Thanks for the link, it's difficult to follow the branch lines from google earth, especially the tramway, another question @baldbof, are the developers of cotgrave colliery contributing anything financially/complimentary to the canal? Other than ugly cookie cutter 'luxury' homes with no gardens, 6 foot high fences surrounding whatever green there is to keep the light out and encourage alienation among neighbors, plastic windows, bradstone, hard standing instead of front gardens with space for 60 gazillion audis and mercs to suit the 'modern' lifestyle and choke up the surrounding country lanes. can you tell I don't like modern housing

 

To be honest, I'm not sure. However, I believe there was some recent controversy about a housing development in that area which threatened to encroach on the canal and its towpath until some objections to the planning application were accepted by the planning authority. I believe that the Canal & River Trust were the prime movers of the objections (it's their canal). Word was that the developer's case wasn't helped by the fact that they had jumped the gun and had already started to strip out hedges and do other clearance before their application was submitted.

 

Sounds about right, typical tactics that they know will go unpunished, this is your canal, on the immediate left of the development:

 

I'm not sure that's the development that I was referring to. The one that was causing problems had houses butting right up to the towpath.

Found it! It was at West Bridgford. https://westbridgfordwire.com/west-bridgford-canalside-development-plans-go-to-appeal/

 

Cor that west bridgford is a stinker of a development, very ugly on a very convoluted site, anyway the cotgrave development is a monster, hundreds of shoebox homes, the developers will be making a killing, wouldn't be too unkind for them to throw a few sheckels your way, pay for some dredging, upgrade the towpath at the very least etc. The real question is, where has all that lovely Section 106 money gone? A canal trust right next door seems a clear choice to me under the s106 guidelines, that is, if they've coughed up the money at all, of course sometimes they don't.

 

We don't see the S106 money. If it goes anywhere, it will be to C&RT who own the canal. From previous AGMs, I'm led to believe that S106 money from other developments has been set aside to assist with re-directing the canal into the Trent via an alternative route as the original is now impassable - the A52 flat bridge at West Bridgford and the built up area at Lady Bay have blocked the original line of the canal.

 

Not too sure how s106 agreements fully work but I believed it wasn't just a financial bribe, the money has to be spent in the local area to mitigate the impact of a harsh development, it can't just go into the great big council treasure chest in the sky, I was wondering about lady bay, it's not clear from google maps and there's no photos, is there a tunnel under the A6011 Radcliffe road or is it severed? Odd that lock 1 was restored many moons ago, though I suppose that area could be used for berthing of boats traversing the trent, or spruced up for wildlife, last time I was walking along the trent there it wasn't looking too good, right next to some environment agency offices ironically.

 

I believe it is severed, hence the need to identify a new route. Apparently Lock 1 is a bit of a mess now having been used as a dumping ground for the uncaring's rubbish. It is ironic that the Environment Agency's headquarters is just across the road. The residents of Lady Bay have formed a group and, along with some of our society rangers and other volunteers, do regular clean ups of the stretch that runs adjacent to Radcliffe Road - and a good job they are doing; they've transformed it.

 

Another day and another attempt to load photos. Hooray!! Successful.

The collapsed wall has been removed from the lock chamber, the weir has gone (courtesy of the WRG) and although there is still a lot of silt shifting and demolition of dodgy walls to be done, we are making progress towards the point where we can start rebuilding.

 

That's a big job (seems bigger than the last one?) - good luck with it!

Keith

 

s.106 goes to the Council, its been tightened up recently but years back I worked at an LPA that found £1m+ in a suspense account that had come from various S.106 contributions over many years and not been spent, they didn't even know which schemes it had come from.

 

I stand corrected. Thank you.

It's starting to look that way. The more we get into the structure, more necessary remedial work appears. That said, we are up with the programme even though all the phases of the "plan" were moved a couple of months to the left. This year, we are praying for a mild winter.

 

I think everybody is!

 

Just a quick up-date.

In keeping with the thread title.. .....some other interesting stuff.

One of the teams found this whilst excavating the clay behind one of the lock wall. It was spotted by one of our volunteers who happens to be a bit of a paleontologist. He spotted what appeared to be a random stone, said "I know what this is" and cracked it open...et voila. Another one was found just a couple of days ago. Seems like there may have been a bit more than lake hereabouts a few million years ago....or could it be a wheel off a prehistoric supermarket trolley?







Back to the lock. Demolition has been more extreme than Lock 15 as the walls were in a truly dreadful state with more and more damage being discovered as we took the walls down. This photo shows the kind of damage we were finding- the front of the lock walls had separated from the supporting brickwork at the rear. Truth be told, whoever built the walls must have belonged to an early version of those cowboy builders Bodgit and Scarper. There was no strength in the corner posts, the infill was made up of broken bricks and assorted loose rubble - there was no bonding.



This is the state of the lock as of yesterday. Note in the photo that both lower corner posts have been taken down before they fell down. The result is only the upper corner posts and the upper forebay remain and they are in a bit of a shabby state. What the demolition did prove was our suspicions from Lock 15 that the quoins were installed first and the brick walls were laid around the quoins. You can see the remains of the quoin posts in the photo at either side of the mitre. Note that the lower forebay does not have the timber floor as did Lock 15. It's exposed bricks all the way.

The invert bricks were placed on end and butted together without mortar, so they are all dry joints. Both the invert and the lock walls were laid directly onto the clay without any footings which may explain why the walls didn't remain upright.

As you can see the walls have gone, the footings have been dugout and the first concrete pour is due this week. The extent of the demolition has its good point. We don't have to try and blend new bricks in with the old as we did at Lock 15 - we have a clean sheet on which to re-build and we are not laying concrete blocks as backing to the facing bricks. The facing bricks will be laid and the concrete poured immediately behind them. If it works, it will save time and money. Given decent weather we hope upward progress will be rapid.



Back at Lock 15, dredging of the half mile back to Lock 16 (the Dirty Duck) has started this week so our boats will be able to reach and pass through Lock 15 in a few weeks time. Could be a "crack open the Champers" moment.

 

Another landmark - dredging of the half-mile stretch between Lock 15 and Lock 16 (Dirty Duck) has started. According to the "plan" the depth of the channel after dredging should be about 4 feet/1.2 metres.

Don't let the clear blue skies and bright sunshine fool you - it was blisteringly cold.

Photo taken by one of our volunteers.

 

Another big day at the lock. The rebuild upwards has started with the first stones being laid to reconstruct the upper off-side sluice which disappeared when the lock went into self destruct. The stones used are leftovers from the Lock 15 rebuild.

Photo taken by one of our volunteers.



The footings and a blinding layer on both sides will be receiving a major concrete pour on Thursday. When the concrete has gone off, then it's time to start laying some bricks to rebuild the chamber walls.

I mentioned earlier that the invert bricks and the chamber walls had been placed directly onto the clay. Here's a couple of photos I took yesterday - this scene will vanish forever in a couple of days time.

The invert bricks laid end-on and close butted up against each other. No mortar appears to have been used.



Remnants of the chamber walls, laid directly onto the clay.

 

Things have been moving forward at a bit of a rate.

Dredging along the half mile from Lock 16 to Lock 15 has been completed and, as a bonus, the stretch from Lock 15 to Bridge 60 (between Locks 15 and 14) was also dredged. The dredging has completely altered the look of the canal. This is the view from Bridge 60 looking toward Lock 15 and, in the far distance, Lock 16 and the Dirty Duck.



Elsewhere on the navigable stretch, the weekend workparties have trimmed back the off-side vegetation from the A1 to Denton in order to improve the line of sight along the canal and remove the annoying and hazardous overhanging brambles, blackthorn and hawthorn.

This is the view of Harlaxton cutting taken from our workboat 'Centauri'.



Onto Lock 14 where progress has been quite rapid.

The demolition of the lock chamber has been completed and the rebuild proper commenced with the laying of the first brick.



We are doing the rebuild different to Lock 15. This time round we are not laying concrete blocks behind the facing bricks. Instead, the facing brick walls will be built as normal, but instead of the blocks which acted as shuttering, when the concrete is poured there will be bracing between the walls of the lock chamber to support the walls against the weight of the poured concrete. The rear shuttering boards will be used as previously at Lock 15. By using bracing struts instead of concrete blocks, we will save both time and money.

In addition, with the concrete being in direct contact with the facing bricks we hope the concrete will penetrate into any open joints and thus eliminate nooks and crannies for water to seep into the structure.

The block walls took the best part of a month to build whereas the bracing struts take a couple of hours to put in place and the are a lot easier on our fragile bodies to move around.

This photo shows the bracing struts and the rear shuttering panels in place ready for the concrete pour.



Today was concrete pour day and the weather gods smiled upon us with glorious sunshine and no wind. Everyone was on-site in good time except the concrete delivery which eventually turned up when it was mid-morning tea break where the consumption of jam donuts and fruit/carrot cake took precedence.

In order to ensure the pressure on the facing brick walls was equalised as much as possible, pours alternated between near-side and off-side.



A total of 91 cu.mtrs ( 13 loads) was poured. The weather was almost too good for pouring as some of the concrete was starting to go off before the next load arrived - we were walking on concrete within a couple of hours of being poured (and not leaving footprints). Anyway, the job was completed and the concrete tidied up. We deliberately left a rough surface which will provide a key for the next pour.



Tomorrow, the shuttering and bracing will be struck and building for the next pour will commence.

Using our revised building method, from laying the first brick to completing the first pour has taken a shade under four weeks. By comparison, from laying the first block to completing the first concrete pour at Lock 15 took over eight weeks.

At the lower end of the lock, some of our volunteers have started renovating the approach walls which comprise of blocks dry laid on the bank of the canal. Work has started on rebuilding the lower forebay walls where they join the approach walls - this work is being undertaken by someone who knows how to wield a trowel.

 

Good Work, as ever @baldbof - my restorations are not "quite" as substantial as that, 91 cu/mtrs concrete is rather different to the loads of timber I use !