On the day they began to build the village, any fellow with a half-decent arm could have thrown a stone clean across the Derwent. In March, 1901, the stream was little more than 20 yards wide along that stretch, between Ouzelden Bridge in the south and the farm crossing about half a mile to the north. There was nothing remarkable about the river, in its remote valley in Derbyshire's Peak District. The next 50 years would change all that.

The people who came to Birchinlee began the transformation of the Upper Derwent Valley into the chain of vast reservoirs that dominate its landscape today. Hundreds of square miles of the land that the families overlooked are nowadays submerged beneath the swollen waters. Better-remembered lost villages are down there to this day. Ashopton and Derwent itself both lie sunk under the largest and southernmost of the basins at Ladybower.

Birchinlee is a lost village of this same valley too, but its story is different. The foundations of some of its buildings can still be traced among the bracken and the conifer plantations on the Derwent Reservoir's western edge. The place they called 'Tin Town' was not meant to be flooded, though neither was it built to last.

The village of Birchinlee endured for only 14 years, and yet the people who lived there were proud and by all accounts happy. At its peak, the population came close to 1,000. Nearly all of the village's menfolk were engaged in a common enterprise, the building of the first two reservoirs and their dams. The accommodation of navvies in a decent, well-planned and purpose-built township was an enlightened act in those days. They repaid their benefactors of the Derwent Valley Water Board (DVWB) by establishing a model community, and by recording its brief history with the diligence that comes with dignity.

The Project

In Britain, industry came north to meet its energy needs. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution from about 1780, factories were built close to the coal they burned, and fast-flowing water among the hills was a free source of motive power.

Once the influx of labour was established, however, great cities began to grow and water was soon needed for the direct needs of large concentrations of people. The combined population of Yorkshire and Lancashire, for example, more than doubled from 3.8 million to around 8 million between 1850 and 1900¹. The first wave of reservoir construction in Derbyshire proved unsatisfactory in both capacity and reliability, as demonstrated by the catastrophic failure of the Dale Dyke Dam above Sheffield in 1864. The 1860s and 70s network of puddle-wall earthworks among the eastern foothills of the Pennines soon came to be seen as a stop-gap measure. New and very large reservoirs, formed by permanent stone dams, would be needed for the 20th Century, and they would need to be bigger than any previously built in Britain.

By the end of the Victorian era, the organising and funding of large public infrastructure projects followed a well-established model. The Derwent Valley Water Board was called into being by a consortium of the councils of Sheffield, Derby, Leicester and Nottingham, first to build the reservoirs and then to manage and maintain the water supply to these four great conurbations. The formation of the Board required a specific Act of Parliament and Royal assent, with the government granting loans to commence the work and underwriting a share issue to raise capital. Shareholders received no dividends; their investment was purely in the assets, with limited prospects of growth, and the funding via taxation was minimal².

The Upper Derwent Valley was near-perfect for reservoir construction. The creation of dams in the narrow and steep-sided valley would make it possible to contain enormous volumes of water. Rock outcrops existed at suitable points on which to found the dams. The high altitude location meant that everywhere that needed the water would be downhill, so pumping requirements would be minimal. It also meant that almost nobody lived in the flood zones, so disruption to communities would be slight. There was really only one problem - accessibility for construction.

The first phase of the Derwent Valley water project was an immense undertaking for its time. Two dam sites were identified, the first high on Howden Moor and the second north of Derwent village close to the confluence with the Abbey Brook. More than 2 million tonnes of stone would be used in their construction. A light-gauge railway had to be constructed to transport it from the quarry at Bole Hill near Grindleford, ten miles to the south of the Howden site³.

An engineer named Edward Sandeman oversaw both the design and the construction of the dams. His genius is conspicuous today. He did not help to build the village, though, and neither did he choose to live there. One of Sandeman's underlings, George Sutton, would do both.

The Times

The first decade of the 20th Century saw permanent and radical change in the politics of Britain. This was the decade in which Liberalism made its lasting mark, with the beginnings of the modern Welfare State. The first pangs of national shame over the treatment of the labouring classes would soon be accentuated by disaster and waste in the trenches of Flanders.

For 60 years before Birchinlee, the navvies⁴ had been vital but undervalued contributors to the building of Britain's civil engineering infrastructure. Their lot, considered from a modern perspective, was not much better than slavery. It was an accepted fact in the mid-19th Century that the expeditious building of a railway, bridge or dam would incur dozens of fatalities. Under such circumstances, political expediency made it desirable that the work was done by a community with no constituency and no dependents.

The most controversial aspect of the navvy villages that appeared around 1900, therefore, was the fact that wives and children were provided for. It was a sincerely held belief among many conservative⁵ thinkers of the time that men of this calling should not be encouraged to marry and father children, since they would inevitably bring misery and hardship upon their families.

In this respect, Birchinlee was a social experiment, and merely the best documented of several. The names of its advocates are forgotten, but it seems certain that someone in the DVWB understood that their duty went beyond the construction of reservoirs. The Board took responsibility for the welfare of its workforce, something we take for granted today, but an act of altruism then. It set out to build a village and a community as well as the dams, acknowledging that years of labour could not be reasonably bought through the promise of a wage packet alone. One of the reasons that Tin Town should be remembered is that it signifies a nation's recognition that lives devoted to service deserve recompense in the quality of those lives.

The Houses

All of the buildings in Birchinlee village were prefabricated, and all were clad, roof as well as wall, in corrugated iron on a timber frame. The interior walls were wood-lined, and each separate dwelling incorporated a Derbyshire grate and flue for heating. Paraffin lamps were used for illumination, including exterior street lighting. Piped water was supplied from a small reservoir constructed to serve the village. Drains and sewerage ran off to a treatment works remote from the communal area. Every home in Birchinlee had a water toilet (albeit in most cases in an outhouse behind the property), which was a rare distinction for any British village at the beginning of the 20th Century.

The same basic design was used for almost 50 structures: single-storey buildings about 40 metres long and four wide, windowed on the long walls. These buildings were arranged along three streets, each one parallel to the road through the village. Internally, there were three plans. 26 huts were open dormitories for single men, while 15 were partitioned into four separate terrace houses for families. A further half-dozen were partitioned into two, for the foremen and other village worthies.

The family accommodation was grouped together in the south of the village, separate from the single workmen's dormitories in the north. Further south still, and close to the railway station, was a group of houses where the village authorities all lived. These included a village inspector and a policeman, both appointed by the company, the schoolmaster and the missioner.

Many photographs of the Birchinlee houses survive. Inside and out, a picture of a house-proud and happy community is revealed, with furniture and decoration no different from permanent housing of the day.

The Village

Tin Town enjoyed many amenities. It had two hospitals (one an isolation hospital half a mile to the west of any of the other village buildings, because these were times in which infectious diseases could endanger a whole community). There was also a school and a mission room for worship. There was a Post Office and a variety of shops, including a greengrocer, a general store, a cobbler, a hairdresser, a draper, a confectioner and a tobacconist. A large number of travelling tradesmen also regularly visited Birchinlee. For example, no less than four butchers were licensed to sell meat in the village. Via the railway, townsfolk could also travel to the nearest town of Bamford on a daily basis.

Other facilities include a communal bath-house, a police station and a recreation hall large enough to seat the entire adult population whenever public meetings were held. This hall had a parquet floor, and the dances held there became extremely popular, drawing people from the surrounding valleys. Last but by no means least was the Derwent Canteen, a public house and the only place in Birchinlee where the sale of alcohol was permitted. To the west of the village there were garden allotments, to which every resident was entitled. To the northeast there was an incinerator for waste disposal, as well as the sewage works.

Two of the three main streets in Birchinlee were cobbled. Many of the buildings were enhanced to improve their stark appearance; for example most of the shops had large display windows and some of them, such as the grocery, had wooden gables added. The schoolhouse and the recreation hall each had a bell tower, and the recreation hall was partly weather-boarded and painted in white. There was also a sports field. Throughout its life, Birchinlee fielded football and cricket teams which competed in local leagues. If maintaining a cricket pitch is the true measure of an established English village, then Birchinlee qualified. Many other norms of life were habituated: the village celebrated events with communal fetes, whether national events such as the accession of Edward VII or local ones such as marriages and births. Concerts and even hand-cranked film shows took place in the recreation hall. There were funerals too, though Birchinlee had no churchyard. A minor irony is that the memorial to the village's dead was erected alongside the church in Derwent village - and so now lies under the Ladybower Reservoir further down the valley.

The Navvies

The dams themselves are nowadays the enduring testament to the remarkable men of Tin Town. Their castellated towers are astonishing structures, even before it is realised that the stonework was raised by a combination of a puny steam crane and gangs of labourers pulling on block and tackle.

Working conditions, though a considerable improvement over Victorian gang-labour norms, were still extremely arduous and dangerous. 18 men were killed outright, and an unknown number were injured, during the building of the Howden and Derwent dams. Some of the photographs of construction activity make the toll easy to understand. Men hang suspended on ropes as they hew with picks at sheer rockfaces, or dig shoulder to shoulder in narrow trenches with walls crumbling above their heads. There was nonetheless no single incident responsible for a cluster of fatalities; the deaths occurred one by one.

In spite of this, there was no shortage of men eager to work on the DVWB project. Arrivals from other parts of the country were taken on, but were obliged to spend a week living in the doss-house at Hollinclough before being admitted to Birchinlee. This practice was more than a means of filtering out antisocial tendencies which might sully the village. It also provided a way to identify and isolate the cases of smallpox that were rife in the country at that time.

Working hours were essentially as long as daylight lasted, six days a week. Wages were around two pounds and ten shillings a week, about a third of what a skilled craftsman could expect to earn in the machine shops of nearby Sheffield in the period⁶. There was a large DVWB site office at each dam site, where navvies signed in and out on a daily basis, and where a queue of men would form once a week to collect their pay. Soon afterwards, a column would march in gathering darkness towards Tin Town. Their nightly homecoming, guided by lanterns, must have been an uplifting sight.

The Families

George Sutton was the village missioner. In a time when the spiritual welfare of a workforce was a matter of conscience for the executive, he was employed by the DVWB throughout the project, and his influence on the physical and moral character of Tin Town was considerable. He planned the layout of the village and supervised its construction, and for the next 14 years the wellbeing of its community flourished under his stewardship. The death of his wife in 1907, leaving six children in his care, does not seem to have lessened his resolve to serve. Fittingly, his was the last family to leave Birchinlee in 1915, having lived for some months in the former Post Office as the rest of the buildings were demolished around them. Sutton also wrote a touching essay on life in the village, the only resident to commit his memories to writing. The bend in the road near where the missioner's house stood is still known as Sutton's Corner.

William 'Dick' Motley ran the greengrocery for its owner, George Sweet of Sheffield. The proprietors of the general store were the Gregory brothers, who originally came from Tideswell, and Miss Bessie Bateman kept the sweetshop. Edith Hallett was the longest-serving schoolmistress. She lived at a nearby farm till she married William Kennedy, son of the local gamekeeper, and moved to Abbey Grange, a house near the village outskirts and one of only two pre-existing buildings in the vicinity⁷. The resident policeman from 1907 onwards was PC Neil McLean. Charles Pickett was foreman at the Derwent site. Richard Hardwick was the village superintendent, responsible for maintenance.

Among the best documented families were the Yateses, who lived at number 23. Edley Yates was the foreman responsible for the pumping stations that kept the dam construction sites clear of water. The family emigrated to New Zealand as the works drew to a close. The Bullards lived at number 25. Other residents included the Hicks family, the Greenings, the Ashworths, the Dobsons, the Atkinsons and two families called Davies. There was also the family of 'Long' George Green, who lived at number 52. His grandson, Professor Brian Robinson, is the author of the most authoritative accounts of life in Tin Town and of the construction of the reservoirs.

The Relics

The population of Birchinlee peaked at about 970 in the summer of 1909. Decline began in 1912, as the first of the dams (Howden) was completed. From December, 1913, huts were being dismantled, and a large part of the village was commandeered in October, 1914 by the War Office. 14 dormitories, four family terraces, the bath-house and the recreation hall were transferred to a prisoner of war camp near Wakefield.

A few huts that were sold locally are still intact. One is part of a hairdresser's salon in Hope, and another is used as a stable in Hathersage. Some furniture endures too, most notably the two billiard tables from the recreation hall, resident in the Bamford Institute, where there are also cups and medals won by the village's sports teams.

On the site itself, the most prominent structure is the remains of the waste incinerator, although parts of the cellar walls of the Derwent Canteen and the raised terraces upon which some of the huts were built can also still be discerned. There are also traces of the station platform and the rolling way leading from it to the Canteen - the route taken by beer barrels in the high days of Tin Town.

One resident that survived longer than most was the locomotive that served the village and ferried much of the stone from Grindleford to the dam sites. Its name was 'Buller'. It enjoyed a second life at a Teesside gasworks, finally going for scrap in 1956.

Best and most importantly of all, there are hundreds of photographs. In most cases, the photographer is unknown, although annotations on some examples record that this was another of George Sutton's many jobs. In the beginning, the majority of the pictures were clearly taken for posterity, since they are formal and posed. In its later years, though, Birchinlee is shown to be a thriving and buoyant place. The smiles on the faces are real and spontaneous, and they are infectious. More than anything else, those smiles ensure that Tin Town will never be forgotten.

The Legacy

Which of us would be content with the lot of the people of Tin Town? We would not nowadays subject prisoners to work so hard and long and dangerous, and neither would we accommodate them in buildings so basic. In spite of all that, the folk of Birchinlee were thankful, and knew that they were privileged compared with less fortunate peers.

The high places of the Peak District invite and reward contemplation. Their wildness is superficial, because every vista somewhere reveals the hand of man. This is a landscape that our forebears embraced and changed.

Those forebears were so brave and so noble. Their lives would have broken you and me, but instead they thrived. In a situation where we can imagine only misery and deprivation, they found joy and fulfilment. Their spirit still resounds in this valley. Come here and feel it. Celebrate life, and banish all doubt.