IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Rafferty Adams Way, COVENTRY, CV6 6JG

New housing estate off Grange Road, Longford, seen through a gap in the hedge from the towpath of the canal.

Steam launch Zara Finn taking part in the Steamboat Association rally and heading for Hawkesbury Junction. The hull was built in 1990 by the Steam & Electric Launch Co and is the Frolic 21 model. This is 21' long - hence the name! The engine was built in 1990 by Ken Dawson and is the well known Stuart Turner 6A compound.

Adamant uses two older hulls and is loosely modelled on a Bridgwater Canal tug with boiler and engine well forward. It is owned by Philip Martino and has been in service since 1995. The current vertical boiler and Cochrane compound engine were not the originals and replaced a Sisson single cylinder engine and water tube boiler. The vessel was participating in a rally on the Coventry Canal and was heading for the wharf at Hawkesbury Junction.

Pair of semi-detached cottages with facade in chequerboard brick, facing onto Grange Road in Longford, on the northern fringe of Coventry. The house on the right was the birthplace in 1856 of the trade unionist Tom Mann and the plaque to the right of the door records this. Mann had a long career as a union organiser in Britain and Australia and was a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. A collection of his papers is held in Coventry at Warwick University. https://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/TMM

Grange Road runs from Longford and Alderman's Green on the northern edge of Coventry over the canal to Hawkesbury. It is seen here from a gap in the fence of the Coventry Canal towpath. Truly an 'edgelands' landscape: pylons fanning out from the substation by the site of the coal-fired power station, a gantry over the M6 motorway just visible above the houses and trees at the centre right. To the right, Grange Farm, a vernacular farmhouse swallowed up by the city, to the left a row of late 19th century houses. The site in the foreground has been cleared for development, probably more housing.

The vessel is the steam powered ice breaking narrowboat Laplander. The vessel is a 30' x 7' iceboat built c1830. The steam plant is a modern installation of c1980-86. The engine is a c1900 built inverted vertical single cylinder by W H Bailey of Salford and must have started life as a stationary engine. The cylinder is 3.5" x 7" and fitted with slip eccentric reverse. The boiler is a Clarkson 'thimble tube' boiler of c1960s vintage.

Turn of the 19th/20th Centuries terraced housing on Grange Road. The 1904 1:2,500 map, on which they are first shown, also shows the extension of the adjacent brickworks, with a tramway connecting the works with the Coventry Canal shown as running along the rear of the gardens behind the terrace, suggesting that the houses may have been built for brickmakers at the works. In the right background is the M6 motorway.