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Chesterfield Canal Trust Work Party at Renishaw

Volunteers from the Chesterfield Canal Trust were working at Renishaw on Sunday 25th October.

From left to right: Volunteers, Tony Winfrow, George Bunting, Mick Hodgetts, Terry Berridge, Andrew Clewett, Roy Stringer, Mick Cook, Yvonne Townsend and John Marsden.

The volunteers were finishing off a washwall which will eventually help to link short restored sections of the canal on either side of the A6135 Barlborough Road Bridge (MAP).

They were laying courses of blocks which will be underwater when the canal is full. The top few courses, visible above the water, will be of stone. When this work, is finished, they will move on to scrub clearance further along the site. They already have plans for the next couple of years.

The Work Party meets every Sunday. Some members, such as Terry Berridge and Mick Hodgetts, have been involved for 25 years or more, other such as Yvonne Townsend and Andrew Clewett are new recruits. They might be volunteers, but they work to exacting standards. The height of the new wall is accurate to within a couple of millimetres of the plans.

The Work Party have done lots of work over the years restoring and maintaining the canal. In the 1990s, they restored four locks between Chesterfield and Staveley and designed and built a completely new lock where the land had been re-landscaped after open-cast coalmining.

In the early years, they were the only people working to restore the derelict section of canal from Worksop to Chesterfield. Following their example the Chesterfield Canal Partnership of local authorities, British Waterways and other interested parties was formed to co-ordinate restoration and raise the huge amounts of money needed. However the Work Party still performs a vital function and is admired by all the Trust's membership which is fast approaching one thousand.

The original derelict length of twenty miles has now been reduced to nine miles. Preparatory work has been done to restore almost all of this gap. Plans are in place. New aqueducts and locks have been designed and named. Public consultations have occurred. Economic studies have demonstrated that a fully restored Chesterfield Canal would bring over one thousand new, permanent jobs to the region. A new canal basin is the centrepiece of the £310 million Chesterfield Waterside development.

When the Work Parties started in the 1980s, the idea of boats coming all the way from the River Trent into Chesterfield seemed an impossible dream. Now it is simply a matter of time.