environment

Ingeokring Newsletter
Figure 4 top photo: view of sedimentation lake with Ham Hall Power Station cooling towers in background and
aeration weir. Lower prictures: two views of Kingsbury Water Park
2. Could we not keep the pipeline on the west side
of the railway line as this could possibly tie in well with
his proposed housing scheme.
3. He would like a meeting with ourselves and TRA
(Trent River Authority).’
The letter paper I used was stained with grease with a
comment: ‘That is from my lunch (Fish and Chips) which
I had with Mr. Simpson from the Atomic Energy Board!’
This suggests the whole project may be dealing with
radio-active waste being flushed down the River Tame
from upstream nuclear power stations! In fact he was
there for the contractor 1 , Foundation Engineering,
whose sister company (part of the Costain Group)
produced Pilcon drilling rigs and he was interested in
purchasing a few.
Other visits were more serious: lots of utilities run
through our investigation area including oil pipelines. I
had met Mr. Simpson at an earlier date when I was
dealing with Mr. Knight who represented the oil pipeline
company. There were the Archer types as well, meaning
there were farms. One was Mr. Mason who had a pig
farm (rather a few pigs roaming freely in a field) and
another who looked like a bachelor in his late eighties,
Mr. Pearman (I wrote: a gentleman farmer who was there
and was not: you meet all sorts on this job). The foreman
of the farm said he was not there, presuming, if I had
listened more often to the Archers radio soap, the
foreman meant he was not all there.
This is all now thirty years ago. The area is known in
ancient times as “Mercia”. The project looks like a mercy
mission. I did pass by years later (about 1985) and found
lakes, wooded forest and with a uniformed park-warden
in a LandRover at the Kingsbury Water Park visitors
centre. The Midlands is being revamped, and a famous
golf course, the Belfry, has also been built since where
the world famous golfer meet to fight out the Ryder
Cup. Present day website visits suggests further
1
Note: Civil engineering projects usually consisted of three parties: The Client (in this case the Severn Trent River Authority), the
‘Engineer’ (Binnie and Partners) and the’Contractor’ (Foundation Engineering). The ‘Engineer’ does most of the design work and then
‘contracts’ investigation and construction work to a ‘Contractor’. The Engineer supervises the construction by making sure the
Contractor does his work according to the contract and approves payment. Hence you have a ‘site or resident engineer’ who inspects
the construction to see if it is built according to the contract/ contract drawings and to see if the work is of quality. The contractors
manager on the construction is known as the ‘site agent’.
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