Manchester Corporation Water Works enamel sign from the Haweswater Hotel

Manchester Corporation Water Works enamel sign from the Haweswater Hotel about charabancs and parties of guests, about 1950.

This sign once hung on the roadside outside the Haweswater Hotel. The hotel was built in 1936 overlooking the newly constructed Haweswater Dam.

Haweswater was a natural lake at the bottom of a deep-sided valley, near Penrith in Cumbria’s Lake District. An Act of Parliament allowed Manchester Corporation permission to build a dam spanning the valley in order to capture and then transport fresh water to the urban population of Manchester, over 90 miles away.

The epic construction of the Haweswater Dam, measuring nearly 500m long and 30m high, took six years, between 1929 – 1935. It raised the height of the lake, creating a vast reservoir, and was heralded as a civil engineering feat.

Despite its success, the project brought consequences for local communities. The villages of Measand and Mardale Green were taken over by the reservoir water and flooded. The people who lived there were forced to leave their homes and land. Much of the villages were dismantled, and coffins were even removed from the graveyards to be re-buried elsewhere. The Haweswater Hotel was built further up the valley side away from the encroaching water to replace the Old Dunn Bull Inn that was under the new water level.

The dam proved to be an impressive sight in the beautiful natural scenery. The Hawswater Hotel would have offered a great vantage point to take in the landscape-defining engineering project. Charabancs, an early type of coach pulled by horses or motor-powered, were commonly used to take people on trips or holidays. This sign, which reads ‘No charabancs, we regret that parties cannot be catered for‘ shows that the Haweswater Hotel would not accommodate large groups of tourists.