Everything about The Jubilee River totally explained
The
Jubilee River is a
hydraulic channel in southern
England. It is 11.6 kilometres in length, and was constructed in the late 1990s and early 2000s to take overflow from the
River Thames and so alleviate
flooding to areas in and around the towns of
Maidenhead,
Windsor, and
Eton in the counties of
Berkshire and
Buckinghamshire. It achieves this by allowing excess water to be taken via the east bank of the Thames upstream of
Boulter's Lock near Maidenhead and returned via the north-east bank downstream of Eton.
Despite being man-made, the Jubilee River looks and acts like a natural river. Its banks offer many varieties of wildlife specially-constructed habitats, intended to act as replacements for those habitats lost from the banks of the Thames during urban expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
At the time of its formation the channel represented the largest man-made river project ever undertaken in Britain, and the second largest in Europe. In addition to creation of the channel itself and its various flow control mechanisms, the scheme involved the construction of many bridges for road, rail and foot traffic; one of which, Dorney Bridge, included providing the means of taking the river through a nineteenth-century
Brunel railway
embankment while it continued to carry main line trains to and from
London and
Bristol. This delicate work to infrastructure considerably more than a century old was made possible by a process known as
jacked box tunnelling, in which a pre-formed concrete culvert 165 ft long, 75 ft wide and 31 ft high was moved through the pre-frozen embankment behind
boring machines, to become Britain's largest example of this type of tunnel.
A further requirement was to take the river through another
Victorian structure, Black Potts Viaduct, which forms part of the railway line built to take Queen Victoria's royal train almost up to the gates of
Windsor Castle. This work called for substantial protective structures to be put in place in order to preserve the structural integrity of the viaduct.
The new river constitutes a highly complex
civil engineering accomplishment which embraced many technical, ecological and social issues; including extensive compulsory purchases, community involvement and a public enquiry. Conception to fruition took roughly twenty years.
However, considerable defects in the engineering were soon exposed when a major flood event occurred in January 2003, necessitating the first serious use of the channel. The channel could only operate well short of the flow capacity that it should have been designed to take, yet nevertheless weir failure and substantial bed/bank erosion still occurred. These issues resulted in a substantial programme of repair and associated upgrading, costing approximately £3.5 million. The
Environment Agency sued the lead design consultants for recovery of those remedial costs, and an out-of-court settlement of £2.75 million was agreed.
The choice of a name for the river was put to the local population in the form of a poll. The result was a strong preference for 'Jubilee', as it was being completed in
Queen Elizabeth's golden jubilee year of 2002 and as Her Majesty's preferred home is at
Windsor Castle, in one of the three towns being protected by the scheme.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Jubilee River'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://jubilee_river.totallyexplained.com">Jubilee River Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
