IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Grosvenor Wharf Road, ELLESMERE PORT, CH65 4AL

This imposing grade 2 listed building used to be the dock office of the Manchester Ship Canal Company. Today (2011) it stands boarded and empty awaiting renovation and conversion.

The National Waterways Museum has displays featuring old boats and artifacts illustrating life in bygone times on the waterways of England. The city of Liverpool can be seen in the far distance on the other side of the River Mersey.

Dock Street, Ellesmere Port, MERSEYSIDE CH65 4DH close to The Shropshire Union Canal

Oblique lighting makes the grass vivid and the buildings of the hydraulic power complex and Island Warehouse somewhat dull. I'm looking across the parallel sets of locks bringing the Shropshire Union Canal down to the Manchester Ship Canal.

This engine was installed to supply fire fighting water to three large flour mills arranged around the lower basin of the Ellesmere Port dock complex. It is a unique inverted vertical twin tandem compound rotative 'banjo' pump built in 1910 by Frank Pearn & Co Ltd of Manchester. The cylinders are 14" & 22" bores x 15" stroke. It developed 80 horsepower and pumped 375 gallons/minute at 70 psi. This engine is now restored and run on steam on the first Sunday of the month. It is the only known survivor of the type although a similar engine was used in a municipal waterworks in Cheshire.

Roses and Castles, the traditional paintwork feature of canal narrow boats. Nobody knows the origins of the tradition (see http://www.canaljunction.com/narrowboat/roses_castles.htm Canal Junction) but such motifs were used to decorate almost everything on the narrowboats. This is the freshly painted cabin of a narrowboat being restored in the island warehouse.

Porter's Row is set just back from the rest of the museum. Originally built in 1833 the four cottages of Porter's Row were, over the years, home to shipwrights, blacksmiths, railway workers and, of course, porters and their families. The cottages and their traditional kitchen garden recreate a picture of domestic life through the ages in Ellesmere Port's canal docks. Today they are presented as representations of homes from the 1840s, 1900s, 1930s and 1950s - each with the decor and features of its time.

Porter's Row is set just back from the rest of the museum. Originally built in 1833 the four cottages of Porter's Row were, over the years, home to shipwrights, blacksmiths, railway workers and, of course, porters and their families. The cottages and their traditional kitchen garden recreate a picture of domestic life through the ages in Ellesmere Port's canal docks. Today they are presented as representations of homes from the 1840s, 1900s, 1930s and 1950s - each with the decor and features of its time.