Foxton Locks and Inclined Plane

Hello can I? Book in to go down please.

Kinda. I've got radio on me at the

minute. Welcome to the Water Rd, which

this time comes from Foxton Locks in Leicestershire.

There are 10 locks here in two staircases of five, so that

means 5 locks are all joined together and they're narrow

locks too, which means that if boats are coming the other way,

you have to wait. We've been told by the lock

keepers who organise everything here that there are three boats

coming up and we'll be able to go down when they all.

Reach the top. The 10 locks take the canal 75

feet down the hill and standing here at the top there are

panoramic views over the Leicestershire countryside.

And this is. Also the site of a former boat

lift, and we'll hear more about that later.

Well, it turned out there were five boats to come up, not 3.

So we've been waiting about an hour and 40 minutes, but we're

on our way now. The locks here all have side

ponds to store water and the paddles are painted red and

white so you know which order to open them in.

And we're getting lots of help too, opening the gates and

closing them because Foxton is a really popular tourist

attraction. It's almost like

Leicestershire's version of the seaside.

My name's Ian. I'm a volunteer lot keeper at

Foxton Locks and the Grand Union, Leicester Lyme.

Now there's an old rhyme, isn't there?

Red before white and you'll be all right.

Those are the paddles. Why is it so important that you

do the red before the white? Right, what the red paddle is

doing is filling the lock that your.

Boat is going into in your case as you're coming down the

flight. And the white paddle is emptying

the water out of the lock that is above it.

Each of the locks has a side pond.

Associated with it. If you put the water from the

lock into the side pond first. Then the chances are we'll lose

the water. Water conservation is vitally

important. On the canals, particularly this

year. And also.

If you do too much then you can cause flooding in silly places

which we don't want. So fill before empty.

Red before white up and down the flight.

I mean, it's an amazing bit of technology, isn't it?

There's hundreds. Of years old.

It's really splendid. It's 210 years old, it's in

daily use, it does its job all the time and all of us.

Working here. Absolutely love it.

And everyone else loves it because it's a sunny day and

it's really. Busy here isn't?

It, it is very busy here today. I think I've got about 15 boats

in the book and it only started at 8:00.

So yeah, people are enjoying themselves.

Young people are coming here and learning about how the flight

works. We always.

Encourage people to. Have a go so I've you.

Know I've got little six year. Olds pushing gates because they

love it. Had a really delightful young

family on a boat today on their half term holiday and the the

children just having great fun. So, Tim, your lad Marmaduke has

been helping us pushing the gates all the way down.

It's it's good for kids to do this sort of thing, isn't it?

It's brilliant. It's physical, it's outside.

There's also not much to learn. It's quite a simple process.

But because there's an achievement at the end of it,

it's really gratifying for both parents and children to do it.

OK. A Marmaduke, have you enjoyed

yourself this morning? I really have.

It's been really fun. So what have you been doing?

Pushing and pulling gates. Pushing and pulling gates, yeah.

And and why Have you enjoyed it? It's just because it's really

fun and really like, you know, like really like, I think it's

good for your strength. It is definitely is.

Foxton Knox is always popular with people who just come and

watch the boats and we call them gong gooslers.

And you're here with your family today, Barry.

We are indeed, and they're very, very interested in seeing what

they've seen. And why did you decide to come

to Foxton? We came here years and years and

years ago when this one was the same age as these, very, very

tiny. And we came here and we've come

from Bedworth, just north of Coventry, and we thought the

kids wanted a day out. So we thought, well, we'll bring

them out for a ride and let them see what goes on.

And they're really, really interested in it.

And what have you learnt so far? It's amazing how the

engineering, like, I wonder what all these big ponds were.

And then I saw water coming in and water going out and it's

just amazing. It's, it's well worth a day out

just to come and see what happens.

And you guys, goodness me driving the boats.

You must have mussels like. Popeye opening.

These locks and all the rest of it, the drivers got the easiest

job drinking gin and tonic Law, so they're OK.

What have you learnt then, James?

That the, that the ponds, what grandpa was wondering about are

so that if so, if the boat was down and they wanted to get up

to the other lock, the water would go out and then it would

go into that lock so it can go up and pass through.

That is exactly what they're for.

Right, so we've. Investigated the locks, but This

site is also the site of the Foxton inclined plane and I'm

with. Penny from the.

Foxton inclined plane trust so just.

Tell us what the inclined plane was.

It was a boatlift. It was built in 1900, operated

from 1900 to 1911, and it was to speed up the process of getting

up the hill or down the hill. That's here at Foxton Locks.

It's a 75 foot and two inch drop from the top to the bottom and

to come through the locks it takes 45 minutes.

If you're at the front of the queue, back of the queue, you

can be waiting hours. So this boat lift was built to

relieve that bottleneck basically, and it could move two

boats up and two boats down within 12 minutes.

So just go through how it actually worked then.

So you had sort of big. Troughs of water at the top and

the bottom. Yes.

So it's basically like a lock on wheels if you think about that.

And it was a counterbalance system.

Each caisson or tank weighed 230 tonnes each.

It was powered by a steam engine, which was only a 25

horsepower engine. It turned a huge hauling drum

which then had cables attached to the caissons.

And one would pull it, would pull it up and pull it down and

sort of pull it, let it down, say it only took 12 minutes.

And each caisson could carry 2 full length narrow boats in it.

It was actually designed to bring the wide beams through.

And that was sort of the original thought of it because

once you're at top of Foxton Locks, all the bridges and

tunnels can accommodate a wide beam.

But then you then hit Watford Locks again, which are another

narrow set of locks. They were waiting to see how

successful the boot lift was. And then they were either going

to widen the locks at Watford or build another boot lift.

But because it wasn't successful, it just didn't

happen. And actually the Grand Junction

Canal Company decided actually they didn't want wide beams

coming through in the end because the queues that

potentially they would cause coming through the tunnels and

stuff. So it was just literally the

narrow boats that came through here in the end.

It only lasted for about 10 years, So what went wrong?

Well, if you think about it, 1900 is very late in the sort of

canal era. You know, your main canal boom

was 1800 to sort of 1840s. It was just not financially

viable in the end. It was very costly to run.

It needed three members of staff to operate it.

It went through three tonne of coal a day to power it.

Gordon Kale Thomas, who was the engineer and designer of it,

wrote a report saying that he estimated 2,000,000 tonnes of

cargo would come through using this boat lift.

They didn't even get 50,000 tonnes of cargo coming through.

And I mean also you think the railways are pretty much getting

well established with moving the goods around.

So the traffic was getting less and less coming through here.

So yeah, so that's why it sort of didn't last that long.

So if you go. Look at the.

Site here at Foxtrin. You can still see those sort of

runners in the. In the hillside.

Can't you? But there's there's not much

more than that left. No, there's not.

I mean the slope obviously itself is quite, you know that

was man made for specifically for the boat lift.

You can see some of the brickwork where the, the, the

upper canal came to meet the, the, the tanks.

The back wall of the museum is actually the original wall.

But when they scrapped the site in 1928, they literally took

everything, the bricks, the boilers, the lot went.

And I think it was just to recoup some of the loss that

they made on it because it would cost just under £40,000 to build

in those days, which is probably quite several million today.

So these days the the Boiler House is your museum, which is a

nice little museum. The Fox and incline plane Truss

built the museum and it opened in 1989 and it tells the story

of the boot lift and also of Justice Canal life.

We have various, we have temporary exhibitions on and

then obviously this year we've got our incredible exhibition

about the festival boats that happened in Market Harbour in

1950. So yeah, we try and keep things,

you know, different things for people to come back and look at.

But we obviously we tell the incredible story of the boat

lift. The lady that opened the museum,

he, she was one of the last people that had a memory of

travelling on the boat lift, Daisy Dainty, she was amazing.

But their family moved from husband's Bosworth down to

Kibworth by boat and they came down through the boat lift.

And she was terrified, she said, because she felt like she was

going to tip out. And you think about actually it

must have been quite a weird sensation.

You're sort of floating in these tanks that are going down

sideways. It must have been very strange.

And is there any chance that the inclined plane will ever be put

back into? Use.

Well, if someone nice and rich will give us at least 40

million, if not more, maybe, but I doubt it.

I think you see the issues that the Anderton have all the time.

You know, they spent 10.9 million restoring the the

Anderton boot lift and they're having to plough more money into

it to keep it going. And I think we'd have the same

issue here. I think you would have to have a

huge reserve to just maintain it because I don't think it would

ever cover its costs. And I think that's obviously the

same issue when in the past it didn't cover its costs.

So it was just costly. Well, that's all for this

edition of The Water Rd from Foxton Locks and the site of the

Inclined Plane. The podcast is produced and

presented by me, Adam Porter. If you're enjoying the series,

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Thanks for listening to The Water Rd.

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