Meet Britain’s last remaining 'lighthouse keeper' who oversees a waterway 30 miles from the coast.
Phil Austin, 83, has maintained his 35ft high red and white beacon on the banks of the beautiful Bridgewater Canal, in Grtr. Manchester, for 20 years.
The retired management consultant said he put up his stone turret as he was barred from building a conventional home by his planning authority.
Britain's final manned coastal beacon, the North Foreland Lighthouse, near Margate, Kent, was vacated by Dermot Cronin in November 1998.
And though Phil's tower has no strict maritime function, he still enjoys watching vessels from his lantern room as they navigate the waterway below him.
Phil Austin, 83, has maintained his 35ft high red and white beacon on the banks of the beautiful Bridgewater Canal, in Grtr. Manchester, for 20 years.
The retired management consultant said he put up his stone turret as he was barred from building a conventional home by his planning authority.
Britain's final manned coastal beacon, the North Foreland Lighthouse, near Margate, Kent, was vacated by Dermot Cronin in November 1998.
And though Phil's tower has no strict maritime function, he still enjoys watching vessels from his lantern room as they navigate the waterway below him.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00I'm Phil Austin and I built my own lighthouse with a terracotta middle band to give you
00:09the red-white of normal lighthouses. Then the top floor, that is built from timber clad
00:17in mirrored aluminium. And the very top is a light which was rescued off a redundant
00:25lightship in the canal. And so that's probably the most genuine piece of the lighthouse.
00:31With it being the best part of 35 miles from the nearest coast, that made me think I'll
00:38never get permission to do it. But fortunately the planners were very empathetic and very
00:45encouraging and they helped me a lot. Anybody who hasn't seen it before, I can tell when
00:50barges are coming past. If they start filming, I know they've not seen it before, but now
00:55most people who walk on the towpath, a lot of them take selfies with my lighthouse in
01:01the background. The canal is very famous. It was built a couple of hundred years ago
01:05and it has the distinction of being the very first canal dug from not changing the course
01:13of a river. It was just dug straight across the fields by the Earl of Ellesmere and it
01:22played a big part in the Industrial Revolution, getting coal from the mines at Worsley into
01:27Manchester. I bought this plot of wasteland and I wanted to build a little house on it,
01:33but they didn't give me permission for that, but said I could build something made out
01:37of stone. So I thought, a stone building close to water, and the word lighthouse popped
01:43into my head. When the planner was down here one Sunday morning, I cheekily asked, when
01:48I'd finished the lighthouse, I cheekily asked, I don't suppose you'd let me build a little
01:53cottage down there, pointing down to the ground, and he said, oh what a super idea, let's call
01:58it the Keeper's Cottage. So I built the Keeper's Cottage. One day I shall finish the inside,
02:06but not just yet, a while.