Regular readers will know that I’ve taken lots of images of the River Mersey in and around Stockport, well last weekend I had the opportunity to have a walk around Sale Water Park in South Manchester. I’d completely forgotten that the Rover Mersey hugs the edge of the water park for a good portion of the walk. What struck me as me and Charlie walked around was the extent of evidence you could see of the recent floods, and what has been done to try to combat the floods with various things that I’ve termed flood defences. The images that follow are all of the River Mersey flood defences, all hand held with my Leica Q3.
These images were all shot in colour, but I thought this set of images would be better if they were all edited in Lightroom as Black and White images. I think that the mood of the day and the dreary nature of the weather all call out for these to be B&W images.
There are various bridges over the river and this one at Jacksons Boat pub. As you can see from the image the banks of the river have been raised considerably from what they were just a few years ago.
I wasn’t really sure what the ground had been covered in when I came across this scene, but maybe these are further protection for the river. I did think maybe the floor was put in place for some form of BMX bike type activities, but either way the raised up nature of this would help when the river rises.
There are a number of places along the whole of the river where the environment agency can alleviate the water levels through the use of overflow gates and sluices. This one has a gas pipe running above it which is what you can see above the gate itself.
I couldn’t at first work out which way the water was supposed to flow, as the river is actually the other side of this huge sluice gate. It took me a while to realise that where im stood to shoot this image is actually the flood plane and this is used to take water out of the river when it rises.
Another example of a sluice gate.
Whilst I was exploring the flood defences I found a signpost that stated that the Bailey Bridge over the river was closed for renovation, so that was put into my memory bank. A work colleague of mine spends a fair amount of time in this location and told me that the bridge being repaired was actually at Chorlton Water Park, so Friday morning I set off to find it. The image above is the bridge.