groups
NWPG
As the regional mobile volunteer groups awaken from their slumbers,we follow last month’s KESCRG and LWRG reports with news from NWPG Newbury Working Party Group (NWPG) Update January 2022
concept. In return for local canal trusts providing us with worthwhile and well-resourced projects, the WRG teams guaranteed minimum levels of weekend digs and week-long camps. A number of canals took part, with the Cotswold Canals and Wey & Arun Canal being the main beneficiaries. The various sites and tasks are too numerous to list but we have worked on locks (repair and rebuild), bridges (moveable and fixed) and spent numerous hours re-surfacing towpaths, clearing vegetation, cutting down and re-planting trees. Like every WRG group, our construction and organisation and safe working skills have improved over time which, along with increased mechanisation, has meant that we now achieve far more in a day’s work party than we did in the early days. Since the start of the pandemic we have managed three working parties – all on
Pictures by Bill Nicholson
Yes we are still here and are beginning to stir from our Covid-19 forced exile over the past two years! As it’s been a long time since we’ve made contact with fellow restorers in the outside world I thought that it might be a good idea to give an update on our future plans as well as explaining to newer folk who we are and what we have done in the past, and who knows, perhaps encourage some of you to join us. NWPG was formed in 1981 with the main aim of promoting the use of volunteers in the physical restoration of the Kennet & Avon Canal. In that particular aim we were only partially successful when we led the construction of the footbridges on the Caen Hill flight of 29 locks at Devizes - which I am pleased to say are still there today, over 30 years after the canal reopened. Fortunately, during the 1980s we were able to divert our energies to the Basingstoke Canal. Here, along with WRG, KESCRG and the local teams we were trained up in the skills needed to restore canals, assisting with the reconstruction of the locks at Woking (the St John’s flight) and Woodham, up to the canal’s reopening in 1991. Not wishing to lose the benefits of the joint working between groups established on the Basingstoke, in 1991 we set up with London WRG, KESCRG and BITM the Dig Deep NWPG on the Wey & Arun: reinforcing at Birtley on the 2019 camp...
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