MIDDLEWICH IN AUTUMN, 2018, photographed by Rebecca Page

'Of the three wiches, Middlewich is rather a hag, unredeemed, uncouth and disfavoured...'

- J.C. Walters, 'Romantic Cheshire' 1930

by Dave Roberts

Poor old Middlewich, eh? That's telling us, J.C.! 

To be fair, though, he did go on to say, '...nor is her dark visage today a discredit, for Middlewich knows the meaning of hard toil under conditions which give her little chance of any cheerful display.'

If you'd approached any Middlewichian in the 1930s and talked about 'the beauty of Middlewich', you'd have been looked at askance and met with hollow laughter.

And poor old Middlewich's dark and gloomy visage lasted for another thirty-seven years until, in 1967, its remaining open pan salt works closed.

An accident of industrial history  resulted in Middlewich being an unredeemed, uncouth and disfavoured hag for so many years. 

In most of the local salt towns the salt industry was, for various reasons, situated away from the town centre, enabling those towns to preserve at least a little bit of civic pride. 

Not so in poor old Middlewich, where the sprawling Pepper Street Works was just a matter of yards away from Wheelock Street, and the Wych House Lane Works backed onto Lewin Street.

The penny-pinching ways of the salt works owners, who only used the cheapest coal they could find to fuel their salt pans, ensured that Middlewich was a grimy old town indeed.

After a rather grim interim period in the 1970s, when it seemed that half the town was being torn down, a much more pleasant  and attractive town slowly began to emerge - the modern day Middlewich which prospective new inhabitants, putting to one side our horrendous traffic problems and lack of amenities, fall in love with.

Rebecca Page has been out and about with her camera, capturing the beauty of Middlewich in Autumn in 2018.

And no one's laughing.

The photo above shows a stretch of the Trent & Mersey canal between the Big Lock and Town Bridge. Fifty years ago this was a very industrialised stretch of waterway, with Seddon's Pepper Street works to the right, just beyond the overhanging trees in the centre of the photo - the area is now the site of 'The Moorings' - and, to the left, Middlewich's gas works, once dignified with the elaborate title of the Middlewich Gas Light & Coke Company Ltd.

Taken from underneath our utilitarian and almost brutalist early 1930s Town Bridge, the resplendent Autumn colours on the canal bank mark the spot where the gas works once stood. The River Croco runs in a culvert on the other side of the canal bank, stretching from Brooks Lane to Harbutt's Field where it joins the River Dane, and acts as an overflow for the canal.

Beyond the Big Lock and heading in the direction of Northwich we see the new housing to the left which has replaced the old Nestle Condensed Milk Factory, in more recent years British Crepe's silk works.

Beyond that, many years ago, stood the Dairy & Domestic salt works, one of many open pan works which have been dotted around the town over the years.

Opposite, and beyond  the trees to the right, is the place where the Croco meets the Dane.

The field on the extreme right is Harbutt's Field, the site of Middlewich's Roman fort.

Middlewich's swan population is thriving as never before and you'll find these magnificent creature in several locations along our waterways.

You can find out more at

MIDDLEWICH SWAN GATHERING POINT (Facebook)

...and now we're back where we started, but heading in the opposite direction, towards the Big Lock.

The Newton Brewery Inn and its large gardens are out of shot to the left, and to the right, on the other side of the canal and the River Croco, where yet more housing development has taken place in recent years, is the area we all knew in childhood days in the fifties and sixties as 'Down Bill Hewitt's'.

This was a huge area of scrubland which had, years before, been the site of yet more traditional open pan salt works.

A brine shaft, rudimentarily fenced off, could be found at the far end, close to Harbutt's Field. 

This has now been permanently capped and few will even know of its existence.

Many thanks to Rebecca Page for permission to use these photographs showing the beauty of this part of our town in Autumn 2018.

FORTY-EIGHT YEARS ON - WYCH HOUSE LANE

by Dave Roberts

It's hard to  believe that the two photos above show exactly the same place.
Forty-eight years separate the two shots - nearly half a century in which Middlewich, like every other town, has seen immense changes.
We're standing next to the bottom lock of the Brooks Lane flight and looking down towards the Town Wharf, Middlewich Church and, in the first picture Seddon's closed Wych House Lane salt works, in the second the Salinae Clinic and its grounds.
The problem with any modern day view of Middlewich is immediately apparent; the immense profusion of trees and bushes which has grown up in the intervening years makes it difficult to photograph anything identifiable at this distance.
Behind the trees on the left, where that singularly unattractive scrubland littered with the remains of old salt workings and old cars was in 1969, can be found Andersen's boat yard. There aren't many boats to be seen at the moment (August 2017) as we're at the height of the boat hire season and most of them are out cruising along Britain's waterways. The boats you can see on the other side of the canal, however, are part of the Andersen fleet.
A full description of the top picture can be found here.
To try to connect the two photos together, we can only refer you to our old friend St Michael's church tower, which can just be glimpsed amongst the vegetation above the canalside canopy at Andersen's.
One further thing ties the two photos together; on the left, just above the 'V' where the two paths diverge can be seen a gap in the wall.
We think this might just be where that blue brick pillar (thought to be part of a pipeline bridge over the canal at one time) stands in the earlier picture.
Here's a close up of that part of the wall, and you can see that there are certainly plenty of those industrial blue bricks still in evidence.

ANDERSEN BOATS WEBSITE

WYCH AND WATER

by Dave Roberts

Today we're deep into Middlewich salt country as we delve once more into the invaluable archive kindly loaned to us by Paul Hough. It's a little difficult to date this particular photograph, although the buildings just discernible in front of Seddon's Brooks Lane works could be a clue. It's not too easy to make out, but the signwriting on the side of the brine tanks which reads  SEDDONS SALT WORKS seems to be partially obscured in this picture by a row of cottages, whereas, certainly in the 50s and 60s, it was possible to read the whole sign from this viewpoint.

And there are other cottages to the right of those, which survived until the end of salt making on the site. The Middlewich Tank Wash currently occupies the site of the cottages in question.
The picture was probably taken some time in the 1930s or 1940s. Perhaps someone with specialised knowledge of canal boats might be able to pin down the date more accurately by reference to the boats in the picture?

The chimneys dominating the picture are the same two which appeared in the background of our original STP logo

and the works itself appears in the background of this classic picture, which confirms forever my Middlewichian credentials and was taken in the days of too much hair and not much stomach, a situation which has now been reversed.

DAVE ROBERTS 1966 Photo: Salt Town Productions

Returning to the main photo, to the right of the Seddon's works can be seen the smaller chimneys of Murgatroyd's open pan works which closed in 1966, and on the extreme right of the picture is part of Seddon's Wych House Lane works.

Also just getting into shot on the right is another chimney which is in the wrong place to be part of the Wych House Lane works, and must be the disused chimney we were discussing here which my Dad took me to see when I was a little lad. Incidentally the colour slide from 1969 which appears in that posting and provoked the discussion on the chimney in question serves to illustrate how little things changed in this area until the end of the 1960s.

To the left of the works can be seen the bridge abutment we saw here, and there is another one on the other side of the canal and river. These could have been part of a bridge carrying a pipe line to bring brine into the works which formerly stood close by. Another possibility is that it was a footbridge, but this is unlikely; the abutments do not appear to have any steps incorporated into them and, in any case, a footbrige would not have been necessary, as the canal can be crossed by the lock a few yards away.

Our old friend the River Croco is on the left, confined in its gulley to serve as an overflow for the Trent & Mersey Canal. There had obviously been a lot of heavy rain just before the photo was taken, and the river is very swollen (the canal, too, looks very full).

The poor old Croco only really looks like a real river in these conditions. Most of the time it more closely resembles a drainage ditch.

Here's the photo again, with annotations. The red line is meant to indicate the possible course of the pipe line.

UPDATE (12th December 2016):

Photo: Northwich & Mid-Cheshire Through Time 

Here's a photo  taken from a lower viewpoint around the same time (or, possibly a few years later). The scene is very much the same, give or take a chimney or two, but the discrepancies might be explained by the difference in the camera angle.

This photo appears to have been taken from the Town Wharf, whereas our main photo was most likely taken from the Town Bridge. *

What is intriguing about this particular version of this familiar Middlewich salt town scene is the wording on the bottom which describes the waterway as the MERSEY AND WEAVER CANAL, a description we've never come across before.

The description is self-evidently wrong. As we all know, the canal is the Trent & Mersey, built to connect the Pottery industries of Saffordshire with Liverpool and the sea, and serving Middlewich's salt industry on the way.

Quite possibly someone at the photo laboratory or postcard company - perhaps someone as far away as that London - was asked to write a description and either misunderstood the instructions given to him/her or simply invented a plausible sounding name for the canal from his or her own sketchy geographical knowledge.

* You'd think so, wouldn't you? But no. A modern-day recce of the area proves this not to be the case. There's a definite curve in the canal, the start of which is just visible in the bottom right hand corner of the Mersey & Weaver Canal photo, and the Town Bridge actually looks out onto the Town Wharf and the  Salinae centre (or if you prefer,  the site of the Wych House Lane salt works.) 
This is evident from this celebrated photo by Cliff Astles which also shows the modern-day area in its summer finery, all dressed up for the FAB Festival:

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Dave Griffiths I would think that this photo is definitely pre-1950's. From memories as a child (late '40's / early '50's), the area on the right, between the end of Seddons and the slope up to the lock, didn't have the abutment shown, but was an area of overgrown air-raid shelters where we used to go blackberry picking. (December 2016)

Celia Burt My sister lived in the cottage, right of the lock. 1953...... (December 2016)

First published 11th December 2011

Updated and re-published 11th December 2016

11th APRIL 2020

INSIDE LOCK 72 OF THE TRENT & MERSEY CANAL, MIDDLEWICH

by Catherine Green

by SpookyMrsGreen

Last weekend we took a trip down a long flight of metal steps, and descended into the bowels of a lock on our local canal. It was Lock 72 of the Trent and Mersey canal, to be precise, where it passes through Middlewich. The Canal and River Trust have closed off a section of canal and drained the water out, so that they can replace the worn, wooden lock gates. We were invited to step inside the lock chamber, where we learned a bit about the 200-year history of the canal system, and could view the chamber from the ground up. It was awesome, to say the least.

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You can see a slide-show of Catherine's photos of the lock open day

by visiting her blog 

SPOOKY MRS GREEN

I didn’t get to hear what our guide was saying, because I was distracted with our children, who had great fun splashing in a puddle along the length of the canal basin. But I did appreciate the beauty of the rough stone walls, and how it looked from below. There is a certain atmosphere around the canal that is both spooky and exciting. I felt a deep connection with the spirits of those who had passed through this lock during the past two centuries, and it was a warm feeling despite the cold weather.

A view from the depths of the lock, showing the pedestrian bridge above.
 Photo: Catherine Green

Although I am not native to Middlewich, and have only lived here for almost ten years, I feel a sense of home in this town. It was partly the canal and the river that confirmed my place when our estate agent suggested properties to view back when my husband (then fiancé) and I decided to move from Manchester. I want to raise our children with an understanding of the town’s heritage, because it is now their heritage, and when an opportunity arises to explore a place that is normally inaccessible, we jump at the chance. Lock 72 was a wonderful exploration, and one that will remain a fond memory for our daughters as they grow up.

The eerie, empty canal  
Photo: Catherine Green

© Catherine Green 2016

First published on SPOOKY MRS GREEN 3rd December 2016

CATHERINE GREEN describes herself as 'ghostbuster, author, mother and wife'.


She is the author of many short stories and novels including

THE REDCLIFFE NOVELS