Insight into waterways

Rob Foxon returned to the Palace Theatre, Newark, with his relatively-new presentation of archive film series called Bygone Britain. He has been attending the venue for more than 30 years, mainly projecting films from his extremely popular Railways Remembered series.

Having amassed a large collection of original monochrome and colour film not just of railways, Rob has been able to diversify into other subjects.

This time it was Inland Waterways, covering mainly the River Trent in and around Newark. As an introduction there were colour slides of barges on the river mainly in the Newark area from the 1970s and early 1980s. It was quite surprising how much of the Newark waterfront had altered and been redeveloped,

The first film, although not strictly related to the river, was the 1942 piece Market Town, which featured Newark during the war years and was originally made as an educational film for schools.

Others featured river craft along the Trent between Nottingham and Hull dating from the late 1940s and 1950s, containing a great deal of content of Newark scenes.

Also present was Les Reid who owns the Leicester Trader, a former trading barge. He organises visits and talks about the vessel and trading on the River Trent. In all this was comprehensive presentation and was well-attended — PAS.