Group report London WRG

groups London WRG

What’s our London WRG regional weekend working party group been up to recently? Mainly spending a lot of time on the Wey & Arun Canal...

London WRG News

As I write these words it’s almost exactly two years since London WRG’s canal restoration activities (and indeed the whole of the volunteer waterway restoration movement’s practical work) came to a grinding halt with the arrival of the pandemic in spring 2020. In the first of those two years we managed to run precisely one London WRG working party - a weekend camping out on the Buckingham Canal in early autumn 2020.

In the second year, since spring 2021, we did rather better - we held four weekend working parties. One was back on the Buckingham again, and the other three were all on the Wey & Arun Canal. But there doesn’t seem to be much danger of us getting bored with the W&A, as local Dave and his team always seem to manage to find us something different to do, and a different site to visit...

Our October 2021 visit was based at Tickners Heath, where the Wey & Arun Canal Trust’s latest big project has been taking shape. This is the reinstatement of the missing bridge which used to carry the Alfold to Dunsfold road across the canal near the south end of its summit level section. It’s a

complicated job involving diverting the canal so that the new bridge will cross it at a more suitable place for road traffic, and building a separate footpath / bridleway bridge alongside the road span. In a repeat of the method used for WACT’s previous road bridge project at Compasses Bridge,the basic concrete structures are being built by professional contractors while all the facings, wing walls and other ancillaries are being done by volunteers as far as possible, to bring costs down to an affordable level. Our work included building some of the brick facing walls on the sides of the abutments of the bridge, and shuttering up for the next concrete pour on the canal channel walls. Oh, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous Navvies, this was the first outing for the London WRG catering kit in 18 months (the Autumn 2020 dig had involved takeaway pizzas and bring-your-own lunches and breakfasts), including the discovery that when we’d put away the kit in a rush in the rain at the end of our March 2020 trip to Ironbridge this had included some leftover food. The swiss roll had turned into something quite unimaginable... Our next W&A weekend was in March 2022, and with the Tickners Heath bridge project at an ‘in between jobs’ stage, waiting for the necessary paperwork for road closures for the next phase, we were working with WACT’s local team at Loxwood. This is the Trust’s showpiece length of canal with something like three and a half miles of canal and six locks, and home to the main public tripboat operation. Our weekend was the very end of the scrubbashing season (before vegetation control took a break so as not to disturb nesting birds). We spent Saturday clearing small trees (in particular ash trees which are suffering badly from the ash die-back fungal infection) and scrub from theDrungewick: the picnic bench takes shape

Martin Ludgate

banks of the canal between Loxwood New Lock and Devil’s Hole Lock, and Sunday giving a serious trim to an overgrown thorn hedge alongside Baldwin’s Knob Lock.

A novelty for us was that the transport between the worksites for us and our tools was by the Trust’s workboat, giving several of us a chance to tick off a couple of locks that we hadn’t boated through before.

Oh, and while you might have thought we’d have learned our lesson regarding not just putting the leftover food back in the catering kit and forgetting about it, it turned out that we hadn’t - so once again there was some liquid cake and solid milk to be dealt with before the start of the weekend...

Our latest Wey & Arun weekend was at the start of April, and we were back on the Loxwood restored section again, but a different part of it and doing some different jobs. We were at Drungewick, near the new aqueduct built over the River Lox nearly 20 years ago. Here there is a rough track leading from a nearby road to a pair of slipways used for launching the Trust’s tripboats and workboats, and also used for access by a local canoeing group.

Well, it was a ‘rough track’ but now it’s considerably less rough, because one of our main jobs for the weekend was to resurface it with Type 1 aggregate - so there was a chance for our dumper, excavator and roller operators to get back in practice after a couple of years off.

Most of the other jobs involved digging post holes by hand - for replacement fencing down both sides of the track, a new waterside picnic bench being built by the slipways, and a couple of road signs.

And finally (as shown in our front cover picture) a couple of volunteers went off on a mysterious mission by boat to try to find some kind of plastic pipe thing in the canal (they did), and ascertain if it was the cause of a slight leakage problem (it wasn’t). They had to propel the boat with shovels as we didn’t have any oars or paddles - or we thought we didn’t, but then much too late to be of any use somebody lifted up an upturned coracle and found a pair underneath it...

Anyway it might not have been a typical restoration weekend but the canoeists were delighted and it’s good to have them using the canal, as it puts some boats on the water, brings in a modest income towards future restoration work, and is popular with the local community.

We now take a break from the Wey & Arun with three forthcoming weekend working parties planned elsewhere. On 14-15 May we head for the Wendover Arm for our first visit in over a decade, a joint dig with our friends in KESCRG. We’ll be putting in the foundations for the ‘narrows’ section of new channel that the summer Canal Camps will be building near Tringford - see pages 8-9 and 32.

Next we head for the Buckingham Canal again on 18-19 June. And on 23-24 July we have our first trip to the Shrewsbury & Newport Canals since pre-pandemic. Again we’ll be carrying out preparation work for the summer WRG Canal Camps: in this case the worksite is by the north west portal of Berwick Tunnel, where the badly damaged tunnel head wall and a former shelter / hut built into it are being rebuilt.

Looking further ahead, at some time in the future we still hope to run a working weekend on the former internal canal system at the historic Waltham Abbey Gunpowder Mills. And in the meantime we’ll probably be back on the Wey & Arun before long.

New volunteers are always welcome on London WRG digs - and it doesn’t matter if you don’t live anywhere near London! (although if you do, we can usually provide transport in our WRG minibus) See the Diary on pages 18-19 for contact details. Martin Ludgate Martin Ludgate