Strange tales from the Bewdley plotlands

"Bewdley is, perhaps, the crown jewel of the plotlands movement - it’s one of the biggest UK sites, home to roughly 163 households," writes Samuel McIlhagga for The Dispatch:

After days of research, a trip to rural Worcestershire and lots of unanswered emails, I’d uncovered a saga involving dead horses, a legal case no one will - or can - talk about, and a landlord allegedly disrupting the water supply to push tenants out - a potentially criminal offence. Clearly, trouble was afoot.

I visited the Bewdley plotlands myself back in 2010, inspired by one of Jonathan Meades's television programmes, and these are some of the photographs I took that day.

If you want to know more about the plotlands movement, you can listed to a recent Uncanny Landscapes podcast on it.

The 1931 floods and the history of Winchelsea Beach

This is an interesting little video. Winchelsea Beach, where we had a family caravan holiday when I was seven, is a small resort that has developed on land that was reclaimed as the sea retreated.

Winchelsea, which was once a major port, now finds itself a couple of miles inland, but the sea used to lap at the foot of the cliffs on which it stands. It is Winchelsea Beach that stands by the sea and is at risk from its moods.

I suspect these floods in 1931 inspired the plot of Malcolm Saville's third Lone Pine story, The Gay Dolphin Adventure, which was published in 1945.

You will see at least one old railway carriage in the video, which makes me think that Winchelsea Beach may have begun less as a holiday resort than as plotlands of the sort which Jonathan Meades led me to at Bewdley.

A post on English Buildings suggests I was right.

Tracing the Bewdley to Hartlebury Junction line

Another video from Holden Webster, who runs the Shropshire Railways website.

This one discovers the southern end of the Severn Valley Railway. The SVR was built to join Shrewsbury to Worcester with the link to Kidderminster coming later providing an East/West link across the South Shropshire border.

His journey takes him through Stourport on Severn where the lines history is preserved with a public footpath nearly all way from the centre of Stourport to the junction with the main Worcester to Birmingham line at Hatlebury.

The station at Stourport has sadly disappeared altogether into a modern housing development, but the large rail viaduct to the east of the town still remains intact to walk on.

Advent Calendar 8: Severn Valley Railway

A train pulls into Northwood Halt.

The railway from Bewdley to Woofferton 2

Our guide Holden Webster traces the line west of Cleobury Mortimer - part 1 is here.

The railway from Bewdley to Woofferton 1

Another railway video from Holden Webster, who runs the Shropshire Railways website.

This one takes us in two parts from Bewdley on the Severn Valley Railway to Woofferton, which lies between Ludlow and Leominster.

The first part follows the line through the Wyre Forest as far as Cleobury Mortimer.

In which I find Jonathan Meades's Severn Heaven

The first programme on The Jonathan Meades Collection DVD is Severn Heaven, which looks at the plotlands beside the Severn near Bewdley. (I can find no trace of it on Youtube, even at the MeadesShrine.)

Plotlands? The London Grid for Learning Redbridge page explains:

During the 1890's, agriculture declined because of a series of poor harvests and cheap grain imports from America. Fields were sold off to land agents, who auctioned them off as small plots.
After the First World War, the British Government promised 'a land fit for heroes' and building one's own home in the countryside was encouraged. Later, the Depression of the 1930s drove people to settle in the Plotlands and build themselves a place to live.

As the Bewdley plotlands have their own halt on the Severn Valley Railway, I decided to find them for myself.

They turned out to be extensive, occupying one side of a wooded valley. The buildings were not quite as ramshackle and anarchic as Meades made them seem. I did not find any former railway carriages, for instance.

Perhaps the most decrepit have been replaced in the 20 years since the programme was made, or perhaps he chose the ones he filmed with great care.

Anyway, the setting is idyllic and this settlement is a reminder that planning laws curb individual creativity as well as protect us from big business. Today the lands appears to be owned by something called the Alfred Halford Trust.

Nearby, an aqueduct crosses the river. It carries the 73-mile pipeline from the Elan Valley reservoir in Wales to Birmingham. This remarkable piece of engineering opened in 1906 and any pre-war book about the Welsh Border will have it marked on its maps.

You can also find these aqueducts in the woods above Ludlow and crossing the lanes beneath Cleehill.

Later. The film has at last appeared on Youtube.

Even later. And then disappeared again.

Later still. A short excerpt has reappeared.