Leaky Beginnings
One of the aims of the observatory was to offer the participants a range of unusual positions and techniques to explore the textures of Kidsgrove. Sounds in the canal ‘pond’ - the section of water next to the old tunnel with large amounts of plant life, had predictably more sounds of biotic origin than the main canal, where the dominant sounds were primarily manmade or man-formed sources - trains, planes, canal engines and water discharges. The more frequent nonhuman animal sound was from the ducks, whose swimming and diving could be picked up further north up the canal.
I wanted to explore why there was visibly and aurally less activity in the canal. On my first research visit to the canal, when developing my proposal, my step children asked why the water was so orange. This became a running theme in further conversations, as members of the public at different points shared their thoughts on its colour. During my trip through the Harecastle tunnel in October 2021, I heard a child ask their mum why the water is orange.
Child: “Did they dye it for Halloween? Why is it so orange?”
Mum: “It’s because it’s all full of terracotta, we’re in Stoke and they used to make a lot of pottery here.”
I loved the question and the reply - and enjoyed the connection to the history of the area, and like anyone thinking of the complicated past of Stoke ceramics, part-nostalgic for a shifted heritage and part-thankful for cleaner air and lungs. At the time the mum’s answer made me smile, but it wasn’t so far-fetched. Terracotta gets it distinctive orangey-red colour from the amount of iron in its composition that reacts to oxygen.
As I had already done some research into the canal, finding blogs and reports on the water and tunnel from almost 20 years prior, I knew that the water was orange because of iron that leached through water outputs in the Harecastle Tunnel. The research process at the time involved two engineers going into the Harecastle tunnel in set early mornings over a long period, and holding a bucket underneath water discharges. The discharges are thought / known (they are at this point known to be unmapped) to be from local pits - discharges to allow water to be pumped out when the pits were functional. The bucket technique sought to measure the parts per million of particular minerals. The results of the study weren’t made public, or were not live anymore on the engineers website, so I enquired with Tom Wilding, my Canal & River Trust environmental scientist contact. This led to a few months of chasing archives! It also made me think about featuring the texture and colour of the canal as part of some first attempts at alternative graphic scores in the project, which will hopefully be an output and part of final materials.
As the water had not been studied or sampled by the Canal & River Trust in the last decade, Tom agreed to come up the the canal to sample both the North and South Tunnel. It should be mentioned here that Tom is based near Birmingham and the Canal & River Trust’s ecologists and environmental scientists have vast areas to cover. This takes a lot of planning and communication between, canal managers and the Canal & River Trust different volunteers, as these on the ground sources of knowledge are often the first to alert on issues on or in the water. The sampling and findings will be shown in a forthcoming archive post.