Last December, Waterfront visited the first of our Winter Open Days at Leeds River Lock to uncover echoes of the city’s industrial past and enjoy a unique opportunity to see how we dam locks and fix leaks.
Damming the top gates with little more than scaffolds, tarps and sandbags
It’s not every day that you come across workmen wading chest-deep through canal waters, but that was the unusual sight greeting us as we arrived early one winter Saturday morning at Leeds River Lock, right in the centre of the city.
“This dam looks a bit of a Heath-Robinson contraption,” explains project manager Dan Timbers, “but it works. We’ve simply built a scaffolding frame and then draped these blue tarpaulins in front of it. Now the guys in the water are weighing down the edges with sandbags and chains. Water pressure does the rest, holding the canal back. Later, we can drain the lock down to river level and then pump out the excess water behind the dam, so we can see and work below the water line.”
Dan and his team urgently need to get started because leaks have been plaguing this 250-year-old lock and restricting its use, for around a year now. It is far from ideal at a crucial east-west connection point, where the Leeds & Liverpool Canal ends, and the Aire & Calder Navigation begins.
“We need the dam in front of the top lock because we know there are leaks in the ground paddles,” says Dan, “but there’s also a hole in the wall in front of the gates, and we think that is creating a leak that travels right around the lock, underneath the towpath. It’s vital to find and fix that leak, otherwise it could wash away the fill behind the lock walls. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen and avoid an emergency in the future.
Dan Timbers, shares the challenges of fixing Leeds River Lock
Even then, we suspect there are more leaks caused by damage to the wooden sill beneath the bottom gates,” continues Dan. “We’ve sent divers down there, and they’ve discovered gaps big enough to get your hand in. There could be other holes; certainly, we suspect that’s the case from the way that you can see water bubbling up to the surface. That’s the risk we face on a project like this; we don’t know exactly what we need to fix until we’ve fully drained the lock.”
It clearly won’t be an easy task, and it’s one that’s complicated by the wide junction between the canal and the river below the bottom gate. This span makes the waterway simply too wide and deep to dam the bottom of the lock with scaffolding and tarpaulins, as has been done at the top. Instead, an ingenious solution using steel stop planks held in a custom frame has been designed and built. He tells us: “We’ve considered lots of different solutions, some of which proved impractical or uneconomical to deliver, so we’ve needed to come up with a bespoke solution for this lock, because there’s no other quite like it on the network.”
Leeds River Lock is certainly a significant landmark in the city, because as heritage adviser Simon Hinchliffe explains: “From here, you can chart the history of the city from the industrial revolution to the present day.”
Built in the mid-1770s, at the end of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal basin in Granary Wharf, Leeds River Lock provided a gateway for the passage of goods down the River Aire, before going on to east coast ports.
In parts of Leeds River Lock, little has changed. Credit Mike Clarke (Leeds & Liverpool Historian)
Simon tells us: “The wharf is where coal came into the city to power the famous textile mills, and where finished cloth headed east to Hull or west to Liverpool. The lock became so busy that tolls were levied to use it, and those tolls paid for the development of the wharves and warehouses alongside it.
A dry dock was added in 1815, and in the 1840s, part of the site was sold to rival railway developers. However, the land beneath the dark railway arches remained with the canal company and they were used for stabling and storage space. Later Granary Wharf became the site of a famed boat-building yard owned by the William Rider & Co.”
But Simon then explains that after the 20th century world wars, road transport gradually began to take over, and the canal began to fall into decline. By the 1990’s the wharf was nothing more than a scruffy, unloved car park. Thankfully, the years since have seen a transformation of the site, as the railway station was redeveloped, and new flats and hotels popped up along the canal, while bars, restaurants and shops moved under the arches. Now Granary Wharf is a thriving area full of resident dog walkers and runners by day, and alive with tourists and revellers by night.
Canal carriers of the age had their boats built, repaired and maintained by boatyards
There’s certainly plenty of gongoozlers taking an interest in the work happening on the lock today and it’s something that regional director Sean McGinley is delighted to see from his spot on our welcome station. “We’re glad to share this important job with visitors today and explain how challenging and expensive it can be to fix a 250-year-old lock like this,” says Sean. “As a charity, we need support from the public. We’d love them all to dip their hands in their pockets or they could volunteer for us, but the starting point is more people knowing about us, and that’s why we put on these Open Days right in the heart of the city.
I’ve been having some great conversations this morning, and we hope that people will go and tell their friends about us too. Happily, our profile is shooting up in Yorkshire, and we want to take every opportunity we can get to share our work with everybody.”
As Leeds is just the first of our Open Days this winter, there’s still plenty of opportunity for you to join us. On the weekend of 8 and 9 February we’ll be opening up Caen Hill Lock flight on the Kennet & Avon Canal. While in the Midlands we’ll be opening up our ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at Hatton Lock Flight on the weekend of 15 & 16 February. We’d love to see you there.
