Leawood Pumphouse

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller

A daily practice of sketching and painting gives you a chance to exercise the big three P's - practice, practice, practice!


"Leawood Pump house" watercolour on Visual 140gsm watercolour paper - Maree©

I did this painting from a photograph, but had no idea what the Leawood pump house was, so I Googled it and found this :

The Cromford Canal Company was formed by an act of Parliament on 24th of August 1789, it had from monies raised (£46,000) to cut the Canal and fill it with water.

The Canal operated successfully for a further fifty one years, 1844 was a dry year, the Canal suffered a severe lack of water, the normal supply from the Cromford and Bonsall soughs had been supplying less water due to the Merebrook sough removing water from the lead mines at a level below the Canal. By the autumn of that year the situation was so serious that a pump was hired and installed by the end of November to take water from the river Derwent.

In late 1849 the Leawood Pump house became operational and pumped water from the River Derwent to the Cromford Canal for the first time since its conception in 1844.

The objective of the pumping engine was to maintain a level of water suitable to keep Canal traffic flowing, the Cromford Canal has a flight of fourteen locks connecting it to the Erewash Canal at Langley Mill Basin, each time a boat enters or leaves the Cromford Canal it takes a lock full of water into the Erewash Canal which needs to be replaced. Also all Canals leak, but even this does not explain the sheer scale of the engine, if water could be taken out of the River Derwent regularly then why was such a large engine needed and why was it built 13 miles away from the nearest lock ? The answer to these questions lies with the significance of the industry on the River Derwent, water which powered the cotton mills was protected by an act of Parliament, so anyone wishing to extract upstream of the mills had to comply to strict conditions with a heavy financial penalty if they failed to do so.

The conditions were that water could only be removed from the Derwent between the hours of 8 p.m. on Saturdays to 8 p.m. on Sundays and no more than one twentieth of the flow of the river in any period of that time, and none at all if the flow was less than 570 tons per minute. The flow was measured at the weir behind Masson Mill, Matlock Bath.

With such restrictions it can be seen that if you wish to maintain a level of water in the Canal but can only voluntarily fill for one 24 hour period in a week then a substantial amount of water will need to be pumped, this explains the size of the engine as it is capable of pumping almost four tons of water per stroke and seven strokes a minute, a total of over 39,000 tons of water per 24 hours.