RIVER CROCO IN FLOOD, MID 1980s

Malcolm Hough of Andersen Boats in Wych House Lane has sent us some colour shots of the River Croco, which runs alongside the Trent & Mersey Canal as it makes its way though the middle of the town, during times of excessive rainfall in the mid-1980s

He writes:

'These photos are taken from colour slides showing the River Croco overflowing into the canal in the mid 1980's. We had lived in Wych House Lane for around 10 years when this happened, and it was the first time that we had witnessed this event, although we have seen it happen more than a dozen times since then.'

When the Trent & Mersey Canal was built in 1776 the River Croco, which had previously 'meandered all over the valley bottom' as it made its way through Middlewich, was channelled alongside the canal from Brooks Lane to the edge of Harbutt's Field where it joins the River Dane, and made to serve as an overflow for excess water from the canal. On rare occasions, however, the flow of water runs in the opposite direction, as we'll see in these photos.

This picture appears to have been taken from the concrete causeway which normally divides the canal and river. The position of the boats in the picture below will give an approximation of the viewpoint  In the distance, towards the cluster of whitewashed buildings on the Town Wharf, you can see that the water level of the river is beginning to get higher than that of the canal.

To the left we can see that the old Wych House Lane salt works has vanished, along with the C of E School, the Wesleyan Chapel and most of the other buildings on the site. The building of the Salinae Centre which now occupies a lot of the site was still ten years in the future at this time.

The second shot seems to have been taken from lock no 74 (also known as Middlewich Bottom Lock). Andersen's boatyard can be seen on the left hand side of the picture.

This photo was taken from the stern of one of the boats seen moored by the boatyard in the above picture. It can be seen that the level of the River Croco has now risen higher than that of the canal, and water has begun to pour in the 'wrong' direction. Note, centre left, the small whitewashed building with the chimney on the Town Wharf. This building disappeared suddenly a few years ago.

The final picture was taken further along the concrete causeway, closer to the Town Wharf and near to Seabank on the right. 

Dave Roberts
Editor.

UPDATE: 31st July 2019. As you'll have gathered, this is a very rare occurrence, but exactly the same thing happened on the 31st July 2019 after excessive rain. This Diary entry was re-published to mark the occasion. - Ed.

Malcolm writes: 'This was at the bottom of Joe Sproston's garden (off Sea Bank), where there was a rabbit warren.We never saw a rabbit for years after this flood. There is also a nice view of Hightown to the left of this image'. 

ANDERSEN BOATS WEBSITE

First published 15th February 2014
Re-published 31st July 2019

FLOODING AT CROXTON, SEPTEMBER 2012

The meeting of the waters...Croxton Aqueduct in September 2012

by Dave Roberts and Bill Eaton
Throughout the year the weather in Britain has been, to put it mildly, somewhat extreme. The early part of the year saw an unseasonal heatwave, leading to hopes of a pleasant warm summer.
Instead we had a traditional British summer with more rain than sunshine (although Middlewich's annual events and festivals were lucky and escaped almost unscathed).
Towards the end of the summer rainfall records had begun to tumble and talk was of 'the wettest September for a hundred years'.
On the 21st of the month the BBC was forecasting that parts of the North-West, including Cheshire could expect 'two weeks worth of rain in twenty-four hours'.
Locally, one sign that the amount of  rainfall, even by Cheshire standards, was becoming exceptional, was, as noted here by Bill Eaton, when the Trent & Mersey Canal was breached near to Croxton Aqueduct (though things were even worse near the top end of the canal where it joins the Bridgwater near Preston Brook - a massive breach in the bank there caused massive flooding and meant that the entire section of the Trent & Mersey between the Big Lock and Dutton Stop lock was out of action and many boats were left marooned.
The Canal and River Trust, successor in England to British Waterways, immediately put out an appeal for funds to repair this massive damage to the local waterway infrastructure).
Observing that something truly out of the ordinary was happening, Bill Eaton took a walk down to Croxton Lane and took the above photograph.

Here's his report to go with it:

'I had a walk down to the canal to see the floods. Bullock's Meadow and the Flint Mill were well under water. This was caused by the aqueduct bridge (where the canal narrows to half its normal width) being unable to cope with the amount of water flowing into it.
The aqueduct was closed off when the canal breached its bank.
To make things even worse, at the point where the Rivers Dane and Wheelock meet the water had backed up to make one mass of water from both sides of Chester Road back to the aqueduct.' - BILL EATON

UPDATE (NOV 27th): As November drew to a close, the work to repair the breach at Croxton was nearing completion, although the bad weather continued, with severe flooding in many parts of the country.

TOWPATH TALK REPORT ON THE CROXTON REPAIRS

SALT WORKS, GAS WORKS and CANAL 1960s

If you own the copyright on this image, please let us know.

by Dave Roberts

Archetypal 'old Middlewich' and a view rather similar to this one but probably taken slightly earlier, judging from the amount of boats carrying coke pictured here (or perhaps that other picture just happened to be taken at a quiet time?).
This is the reality of that 'lovely old town' which everyone remembers (or thinks they remember) - a grimy, shabby, work-a-day place full of smoking chimneys - ' a mean old town' as Dr Johnson is said to have described it..
That coke is en route to Middlewich Gasworks, which can be seen in the right background, with piles of the black stuff already waiting in the yard to be used.
The use of coke to make town gas can lead to a little confusion as, when gas production first started, it was made from coal and coke was one of the by-products.
However, improvements made later meant that town gas could be produced from other substances such as oil, for example, and coke which had been made as a by-product of other industrial processes.
In other words, rather than making coke, Middlewich Gas Works was, by this time using it to make town gas.
At the time this photograph was taken (probably early to mid-1960s) most of the Gasworks, once the property of the Middlewich Gas Light & Coke Company but by now the province of the North Western Gas Board, had disappeared. This was probably as a result of the switch from using coal to using coke to make the gas.
But could they really be manufacturing town gas in that one small brick building?
And how did they get the coke to the works? Did they use barrows to wheel it across that rickety-looking bridge across the River Croco and through that gap in the wall? If they did it would have taken them the whole day, if not more, to unload five boat loads.
It's much more likely that, by this date, they used a tipper truck of some kind and made the short journey from the gasworks, past the old corn mill (now Town Bridge Motors) and along the canal side to empty the boats.
Even so it would still have been a time-consuming and tricky process.
There are, though, other possibilties: could that coke, in fact, be destined not for the Gas Works, but for Seddon's Salt Works on the other side of the canal (it was still in operation until 1967)?
You can just make out, under the pipe-bridge which carried the coal gas into town, more canal boats. Were they unloading at Seddon's and were the boats in the foreground awaiting their turn?
The difficulty with that theory is that, so far as we know, the salt works in Middlewich always used coal (and cheap, low-grade coal too) rather than coke to make salt.
So we have to come to the conclusion that those boats were indeed carrying coke to Middlewich Gas Works.
Unless, of course, the black stuff in the boats is coal and not coke. But we could go on for ever like this...
Just a few years later the whole process would be just a memory with the introduction of North Sea Gas.
That little brick building, though, survives. It's very much altered and goes under the name of 'Cheshire House'
Note that the boats all carry the British Waterways livery of blue and yellow.
We've just had to say goodbye to British Waterways, which has been replaced by the Canal & River Trust.

CART WEBSITE