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Newcastle-under-Lyme Canal
 
"Canal stories flow from memories of waterway"


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Newcastle-under-Lyme Canal Pt 2


 

Historian Fred Hughes writes....   

The Newcastle Canal travelled behind Rookery Lane Trent Vale and passed by Bridge Road turning north to shadow the Lyme Brook into Newcastle. I’m grateful to Miss A White of Fletcher Road who wrote to the Sentinel many years ago with her memories of the canal when she was young. Her letter recalls the sweep from Rookery Lane.

“Here was a canal wharf where men loaded the barges with coal,” she writes. “Opposite the end of Rookery Lane is a Trent Vale council estate part of which was erected over the filled-in canal. One plodded along the towpath behind the houses in Springfields where a drawbridge linked Clayton Lane. This was known as Knapper’s Gate.”

Miss White’s correspondence gives an evocative clue to the once rural aspects of this part of Stoke on Trent and Newcastle.

 

“The canal ran between Lyme Brook and the main A34,” Potteries’ historian Steve Birks confirms. “It was clearly open countryside then with the canal crossing several drawbridges allowing carted transport from Clayton to Penkhull. There was a lot of industrialisation around the 1950’s with brickworks, bakeries and developing retail sites. This contrasted with the drawbridge near Swan Lane that could still be seen in living memory. It’s hard to imagine now how London Road looked in its various stages of transition from rural to retail.”

 

 Historian Richard Talbot knows this area better than most.

“The old Swan Lane, opposite School Street once had an ancient inn near its corner with London Road,” he tells me. “This public house was called The Swan which was demolished when the councils widened the road back in the 1950’s. It was replaced by much larger premises but kept its name for a while. Now it serves as a popular Chinese restaurant.”

The Swan
The Swan

photo: © Richard Talbot

There’s little doubt that bargees must have frequently called at the Swan for it was a popular hostelry for all types of travellers as well as regulars. A photograph loaned to me by Richard showing the forecourt as a hive of activity in the late 1800’s illustrates this very well.

The Boat and Horses pub in Stubbs Lane
The Boat and Horses pub in Stubbs Lane
photo: March 2003

Further on the road into Newcastle passes the hospital, London Road Bowling Club and the Jewish cemetery. After which Stubbs Gate slopes to the left where another ancient pub called the Boat and Horses is a dead giveaway to the location of the canal’s terminus.

“But actually it ended a bit further west of the pub, somewhat closer to Brook Lane,” says Steve. “There was a basin here which became sidings to the Newcastle railway line. You could still see some of this as recently as 1970. The Newcastle gas works also stood in this location below Brook Lane and Goose Street where the giant retail park occupies the land these days. The only rural bit left is the northern entrance to Lyme Valley Parkway.”

This urban greenway is a multi-agency funded partnership incorporating a wildlife sanctuary in protected woodland alongside a children’s playground.

 “It’s great to see the return of plenty of wildlife in these parts,” says frequent visitor John Stonior from nearby Lynwood Close. “I cycle here every day and it’s a joy to see how much it has been improved.”

John and I walk along the tracks beside the motionless seclusion of the former canal. It is very much a reed-bed these days overhung with hawthorn and willow-herb and a sea of purple thistle where coal-barges once ploughed a watery highway.  

the remains of the Newcastle canal in the wood - Lyme Valley
the remains of the Newcastle canal in the wood - Lyme Valley

“On the other side is London Road and the Jewish cemetery,” says John. “I read somewhere that this was where the workhouse mangers buried child paupers,” a sad story indeed.

But over the road from the hospital entrance is an uplifting related tale of benefaction and goodwill. Here among unappealing traffic, along one of the district’s busiest roads, stands a quaint whitewashed cottage that would be more suited to an English country lane. Currently the home of Keele University researcher Ricky Mullis, a small plaque on the wall curiously proclaims it to be ‘Hovis Cottage’.

“I bought the cottage seven years ago,” says Ricky. “It is tiny by any standards but the garden at the back leading to the canal more than makes up for the traffic.”

Small it is indeed, like a dolls house standing alongside a pair of semis. But what really make this trio of houses remarkable are their back gardens that tumble into the wildlife reed-bed and the untamed copse that is the very last bit of the ill-starred Newcastle Canal. Next door neighbours Dorothy Fulton and Lavinia Pawliszyn also share this idyllic enclave. Dorothy has lived here the longest and knows a bit more about Hovis Cottage.

“The story is like an enchanted fairytale,” she explains. “Apparently the Hovis Company – yes the genuine Hovis Bakers – wanted to raise money for the new hospital so they had this cottage built and then raffled it off. It was much too small for the winners, poor people with a large family. So a man name Prime stepped up and bought if from them.”


 Satisfaction for everybody then it seems. And here it is, a tiny country-cottage dolls house standing demurely on the now hectic, once rustic, London Road. Whatever next?

 

more on the Newcastle-under-Lyme canal

 

27 July 2008


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Newcastle-under-Lyme Canal Pt 2