Edwin Clark

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Edwin Clark (1814-1894)^[1] was an English civil engineer, specialising in hydraulics. He is chiefly remembered as the designer of the Anderton Boat Lift (1875) near Northwich in Cheshire, which links the navigable stretch of the River Weaver with the Trent and Mersey Canal ^[2].

[edit] Clark's Boat Lifts

Clark was an experienced hydraulic engineer with the firm of Clark, Stansfield & Clark, consulting engineers of Westminster when he was called upon in 1870 by Edward Leader Williams to design a boat lift to raise boats 50 feet from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal ^[3]. Clark designed the original hydraulic structure opened in 1875, which was later replaced by a wire rope and pulley system from 1908 to 1983 before being returned to hydraulic operation in 2002^[4].

He went on to design other boat lifts in other European countries. In 1979 he presented a project to the Belgian government including four of his lifts. This project received governmental approval in 1882, but it lasted until 1917 before it was totally operational. After the canal had been modernised in the sixties, the first plan was to knock down the old installations and to redevelop the land. Local people fought to maintain the installations and eventually won the long battle. In 1998 the whole site of the Canal du Centre became World Heritage Site. In 2007, the restauration work at all but one of the four Belgian Clark lifts is almost finished^[5].

[edit] Legacy

Clark appears in the painting Conference of Engineers at the Menai Straits Preparatory to Floating one of the Tubes of the Britannia Bridge by John Lucas ^[1], and is also remembered in the name of the public trip boat that operates on the Anderton Boat Lift

[edit] References