Beeston's Canalside Heritage Centre

Hello and welcome to this edition of the Water Rd podcast,

which comes from Beeston in Nottinghamshire.

And the sound you can hear behind me is the mighty river

trend tumbling over the big wide Weir here at Beeston.

Because Beeston is one of the places where they dug a canal,

the Beeston cut to avoid parts of the Trent that were too

tricky to navigate. So when you arrive at Beeston,

you're coming downstream from Trent Junction and the Crown

Fleet cut. The first thing you have to do

is to pull onto the lock landing and avoid having your boat

pulled towards the Weir. When you get to Beeston Lock,

you find that unusually, there's a paddle open at both ends.

Now normally on a canal lock that would be a real no no,

because what you're doing is just running water straight the

way through and the pound above the lock would get very low.

But of course this is not a normal canal lock, it's fed by

the river. So the idea is that by having a

paddle open at each end, the river is always topping up the

canal. And that means that the Beeston

Canal and the Nottingham Canal we'll never run out of water as

long as the Trent is there. There's a collection of canal

buildings next to the Loch, including a row of beautifully

restored cottages which are now the heritage centre.

Stuart Craven is the man who masterminded the project to

bring the cottages back from dereliction, and he told me how

it all came about. I used to live on a narrow boat

further down on the beast and cut not far from here and I used

to pass the cottages every morning going to work.

I was a builder by trade and I could see them getting further

and further into. They were really derelict and

things. I started to look at we with

setting up a trust to try and do something with the cottages.

There was a lady on the other side of the road here, Janet and

she, she was an artist and it all sort of started to come

together with the fact that William Wilde was an artist

here. We knew what the cottages looked

like because of the pictures he'd actually painted and it

went on from there. We had to get our volunteers to

start stripping it out, cleaning it up, because it was really,

really in a bad state. Part of it collapsed just after

we took over the lease of it. The back fell out of the

building. But with hard work and plenty of

volunteers, we've got it to where it is today.

And it's all taken quite a long time though, hasn't it?

I started to look at these cottages to do something with

them in 2000 and 2009 and over that period we had Lottery

Heritage Fund funding or Heritage Lottery funding as it

was in those days. We managed to secure funding for

that and we opened our doors in 2017.

So it was, it was quite a uphill struggle at times and thinking

what are we doing? But with, as I say again, with

our brilliant volunteers, we've got it looking Absolutely

Fabulous. And the latest thing is dressing

the end cottage as it was in the 1840s. 1842 We know who lived in

these cottages from 1842 to 1921, and it was a Martha Rice

and her family who lived in the cottage.

We don't exactly know which cottage pure and simply because

it didn't state which cottages people were in.

But we've based it on Martha Rice and her family.

And there's a lovely ghost story here from David Roberts who

lived here in the 60s and the 70s.

And that's followed through when we found a clipping from the

paper and it was about Martha Rice who'd sadly in 1847 died in

bed with an apparition from God. So we saying that is our ghost.

So it's, it's lovely. If walls could talk, it would

be. It would be brilliant.

Now of course, you've expanded the buildings as well, and

you've got a fantastic little tea room downstairs.

And the gardens are a big thing as well, aren't they?

The gardens are again. It's volunteers that look after

the gardens. We've got a team of gardeners

who come in every Wednesday and Thursday mornings to straighten

the place up, water plants, do all sorts of things in there.

And there's a group of fixers as they're called.

And it's, it's actually a team of guys, there's about half a

dozen of them who come in and they make things, fix things.

Great, great team. So education and sort of telling

people about the history of this area is a big thing for you it.

That is, that is our remit, education and showing the

heritage of the canals, the canal network and and these

cottages and it expands right out from there that the the, the

world is our oyster in what we can we can expand to.

So what would this area have been like when it was really

busy back in the day then? The Beast and Cut and these

block cottages and the and the block keepers cottage were built

all at the same time in 1796. And there was nothing down here

at all. It was just completely barren.

It was rye grass and that sort of thing.

And the closest to us would be about a mile away was the

closest building to this. And the Beast and Rhinans

started to develop from there, from the from that period.

So the canal is really responsible for this whole area.

Absolutely, yes. One of the first things I think

was really built. They converted a farmhouse into

the boat, the boat and horses as it is now.

And that was all linked to somebody who used to live here

as well. One of the ladies married the

farmer and it it was all mixed in.

This was the start of the Rylands.

Yeah. And what sort of cargoes would

have been carried through here? Anything you can think of, coal

from up in up in Staffordshire, lace, steel, stone, you name it,

they carried it. And it would have been really

busy. Oh, absolutely there, there was

an old lock, the old lock as we call it here, which is blocked

off now. Any boats that were coming down

the Trent could go through the lock, but if they hadn't got a

load on, if it was, if they weren't laden, they could go

through the old lock back onto the Trent and through the

shallows at Clifton. But otherwise they had to pay a

toll to go from here to Nottingham.

They were making quite a profit on it as well at the time and it

was only about a penny or so to use the canal but started to

dawn. Off and I think you've got the

remains of a blacksmith's place in the garden as well.

Yes, absolutely. It's a single story now.

We use it as the gardener's store and you can see where the

old stairs went up into there and we know what it looked like

from the paintings by William Wilde, who was in the 1870s,

eighteen 80s. He was a lot keeper here and he

painted all the cottages. Well, I think you've done a

fantastic job at recreating the cottages.

It's amazing. It's.

Far better than I ever thought it would come out at.

Didn't hard work with a lot of people and we've got something

there that we can be proud of. And that's all for this edition

of the Water Rd Podcast from Beeston in Nottinghamshire.

The podcast is produced and presented by me, Adam Porter.

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