Puddle Fact: Work first started on The Puddle in 2014
So where did The Puddle Project get its name from?
Before The Puddle became what people see it as today, it originally started life as a personal project, the realisation of a childhood dream if you like.
The Puddle name came from two separate sources almost 40 years apart:
Childhood Dreams:
From a very young age I was always mad keen on fishing and occasionally “mother” would walk over the Cantilever Bridge (Warrington) from the centre of the known universe (Latchford) to check up on me as I fished at Ackers Pit. At the time, I thought she was just a jam butty delivery service or a very early Deliveroo.
The butties were never great if truth be told, but we learned to make the best of what we had although as a school dinner lady I still suggest she could have done better!
Anyway, even then I promised / threatened that one day I would buy Ackers Pit and build a cafe on it for her to make me my packed lunches.
I can’t remember the exact responses but they usually went down the path of:
“you cheeky so ‘n’ so” or “you’re bloody puddled!” - I heard these phrases quite a lot!
Warrington slang - to be or act “puddled” was always a mild, non offensive way of implying that someone was a little daft, silly or mad, it was almost always said with a sense of affection.
Puddle Engineering:
When I first started work on the land and cleared all of the waste that had been dumped for years.
My thoughts quickly turned to creating the ponds, little did I realise that I had purchased the only piece of land in Warrington that wasn’t clay! Pure quarry sand, it was like Southport beach once we dug two feet down!
I mean, how unlucky can you get? If you look at Warrington it is just one big body of water with a few bits of land stuck in it for fun:
River Mersey
Manchester Ship Canal
Bridgewater Canal
Sankey Canal
Appleton Reservoir
Lymm Dam
To name just a few!
If I was to have a pond, which was kind of the point then I’d have to find a solution:
Keep digging until we hit clay.
Buy some clay!
Reservoir Liner!
Give up!
After deciding that a reservoir liner was the only option worth investigating, I contacted a manufacturer believing that what I was trying to do was a big job, plus I wasn’t really convinced as I had visions of a pond liner suitable for a garden project.
It was at this stage my naivety was pounced upon by the engineers as they mocked my project as being a puddle!
The name stuck and The Puddle came into being!
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