Hello and welcome to this edition of the Water Rd podcast, which comes from Beeston in Nottinghamshire.

And the sound you can hear behind me is the mighty river trend tumbling over the big wide Weir here at Beeston.

Because Beeston is one of the places where they dug a canal, the Beeston cut to avoid parts of the Trent that were too tricky to navigate.

So when you arrive at Beeston, you're coming downstream from Trent Junction and the Crown Fleet cut.

The first thing you have to do is to pull onto the lock landing and avoid having your boat pulled towards the Weir.

When you get to Beeston Lock, you find that unusually, there's a paddle open at both ends.

Now normally on a canal lock that would be a real no no, because what you're doing is just running water straight the way through and the pound above the lock would get very low.

But of course this is not a normal canal lock, it's fed by the river.

So the idea is that by having a paddle open at each end, the river is always topping up the canal.

And that means that the Beeston Canal and the Nottingham Canal we'll never run out of water as long as the Trent is there.

There's a collection of canal buildings next to the Loch, including a row of beautifully restored cottages which are now the heritage centre.

Stuart Craven is the man who masterminded the project to bring the cottages back from dereliction, and he told me how it all came about.

I used to live on a narrow boat further down on the beast and cut not far from here and I used to pass the cottages every morning going to work.

I was a builder by trade and I could see them getting further and further into.

They were really derelict and things.

I started to look at we with setting up a trust to try and do something with the cottages.

There was a lady on the other side of the road here, Janet and she, she was an artist and it all sort of started to come together with the fact that William Wilde was an artist here.

We knew what the cottages looked like because of the pictures he'd actually painted and it went on from there.

We had to get our volunteers to start stripping it out, cleaning it up, because it was really, really in a bad state.

Part of it collapsed just after we took over the lease of it.

The back fell out of the building.

But with hard work and plenty of volunteers, we've got it to where it is today.

And it's all taken quite a long time though, hasn't it?

I started to look at these cottages to do something with them in 2000 and 2009 and over that period we had Lottery Heritage Fund funding or Heritage Lottery funding as it was in those days.

We managed to secure funding for that and we opened our doors in 2017.

So it was, it was quite a uphill struggle at times and thinking what are we doing?

But with, as I say again, with our brilliant volunteers, we've got it looking Absolutely Fabulous.

And the latest thing is dressing the end cottage as it was in the 1840s.

1842 We know who lived in these cottages from 1842 to 1921, and it was a Martha Rice and her family who lived in the cottage.

We don't exactly know which cottage pure and simply because it didn't state which cottages people were in.

But we've based it on Martha Rice and her family.

And there's a lovely ghost story here from David Roberts who lived here in the 60s and the 70s.

And that's followed through when we found a clipping from the paper and it was about Martha Rice who'd sadly in 1847 died in bed with an apparition from God.

So we saying that is our ghost.

So it's, it's lovely.

If walls could talk, it would be.

It would be brilliant.

Now of course, you've expanded the buildings as well, and you've got a fantastic little tea room downstairs.

And the gardens are a big thing as well, aren't they?

The gardens are again.

It's volunteers that look after the gardens.

We've got a team of gardeners who come in every Wednesday and Thursday mornings to straighten the place up, water plants, do all sorts of things in there.

And there's a group of fixers as they're called.

And it's, it's actually a team of guys, there's about half a dozen of them who come in and they make things, fix things.

Great, great team.

So education and sort of telling people about the history of this area is a big thing for you it.

That is, that is our remit, education and showing the heritage of the canals, the canal network and and these cottages and it expands right out from there that the the, the world is our oyster in what we can we can expand to.

So what would this area have been like when it was really busy back in the day then?

The Beast and Cut and these block cottages and the and the block keepers cottage were built all at the same time in 1796.

And there was nothing down here at all.

It was just completely barren.

It was rye grass and that sort of thing.

And the closest to us would be about a mile away was the closest building to this.

And the Beast and Rhinans started to develop from there, from the from that period.

So the canal is really responsible for this whole area.

Absolutely, yes.

One of the first things I think was really built.

They converted a farmhouse into the boat, the boat and horses as it is now.

And that was all linked to somebody who used to live here as well.

One of the ladies married the farmer and it it was all mixed in.

This was the start of the Rylands.

Yeah.

And what sort of cargoes would have been carried through here?

Anything you can think of, coal from up in up in Staffordshire, lace, steel, stone, you name it, they carried it.

And it would have been really busy.

Oh, absolutely there, there was an old lock, the old lock as we call it here, which is blocked off now.

Any boats that were coming down the Trent could go through the lock, but if they hadn't got a load on, if it was, if they weren't laden, they could go through the old lock back onto the Trent and through the shallows at Clifton.

But otherwise they had to pay a toll to go from here to Nottingham.

They were making quite a profit on it as well at the time and it was only about a penny or so to use the canal but started to dawn.

Off and I think you've got the remains of a blacksmith's place in the garden as well.

Yes, absolutely.

It's a single story now.

We use it as the gardener's store and you can see where the old stairs went up into there and we know what it looked like from the paintings by William Wilde, who was in the 1870s, eighteen 80s.

He was a lot keeper here and he painted all the cottages.

Well, I think you've done a fantastic job at recreating the cottages.

It's amazing.

It's.

Far better than I ever thought it would come out at.

Didn't hard work with a lot of people and we've got something there that we can be proud of.

And that's all for this edition of the Water Rd Podcast from Beeston in Nottinghamshire.

The podcast is produced and presented by me, Adam Porter.

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