Foxton Locks and Inclined Plane

0:00 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.

0:43 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.

1:16 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.

1:48 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.

2:15 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.

2:49 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.

3:24 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.

3:52 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.

4:27 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.

5:01 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.

5:42 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.

6:18 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.

6:51 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.

7:18 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.

7:48 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.

8:24 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.

8:54 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.

9:30 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.

10:01 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.

10:37 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, please give us a nice review because it really does help people to find us.

11:12 And please follow or subscribe to the podcast if you haven't done so already. Thanks for listening to The Water Rd.