The Jackfield Landslide of 1952

Jackfield, a riverside community near Ironbridge, is no stranger to the ground shifting beneath its feet.

This part of the Severn Gorge has been unstable for as long as anyone has kept records. The river cut the gorge only a few thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, leaving raw, young valley sides of stiff, fissured clay, shale and marl that soak up winter rain. Add generations of clay mining, tile-making, quarrying and road building, and the slopes were always vulnerable.

The slip near the church, 1881

In March 1881 a deputation from Jackfield went before the local Board to complain about the road beyond St Mary's Church, running on towards the Salthouse and the Werps. Their spokesman, Mr Oakes, described "the slip near the church" and the loss and inconvenience it caused: private attempts to keep the way open by tipping rubble and refuse had failed, because the road "continued to give way", leaving people with no passable route to their houses.

The Board admitted its liability but flinched at the cost. A retaining wall or piling was thought impossible before the summer, so the surveyor was instructed simply to lay enough metal to make the road passable "for the present". Seventy years later, movement on the same hillside would devastate part of the village.

The warning signs

The winter of 1951 was exceptionally wet. In November a water main cracked near the riverbank cottages, a red flag that the ground was shifting. By February 1952 the village road had begun to buckle and lean towards the Severn.

Railwaymen were among the first to raise the alarm. Picture Post found sub-ganger Aston and his men slewing the metals back into line along a 400-yard stretch of slip, six inches sideways on a bad day. In all, the track was shifted some twenty-five feet, and around a thousand tons of cinders were tipped in to keep it level. Ted Aston of Jackfield was among the men working the bars.

Despite their efforts, the line eventually had to be realigned further up the bank, and trains slowed to a crawl on the Jackfield section.

Houses begin to fail

For villagers, the change was terrifyingly personal. Cracks crept along walls, doors jammed shut, floors lifted, drains snapped apart.

The first casualty was Pear Tree Cottage on Salthouse Road, which split in two. Then came Birbick's Bank, just below the church, where houses began pulling away from one another.

Among the most poignant losses was the Post Office, run by Mrs Elsie Bradburn. She remembered:

"First of all the floor started coming up. The bricks started coming up. There were cracks in the walls. The drains were going. My father said they would never stop it. We had to make a move."

Parts of Jackfield were becoming uninhabitable rather than emptying all at once. Houses were evacuated in ones and twos as they cracked; gas mains were relaid above ground, water pipes burst repeatedly, and the riverside road sank, folded and slid towards the Severn. Ordinary life carried on around the damage. The Post Office was still trading when it was photographed on 13 August 1952, shortly before it too had to be given up.

National headlines

The story gripped the nation. British Pathé filmed the leaning houses and broken roads, and Picture Post ran a photo-essay by Thurston Hopkins under the title "Village on the Slide".

On 24 April 1952 the Express & Star reported that the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was to be asked to examine the landslide and report on it, following a conference at Broseley town hall attended by the Ministry of Works, Shropshire County Council and the railway.

Estimates of how many homes were lost vary: some reports speak of 16, others 19, and still others as many as 27 cottages destroyed or condemned. Roughly 17 families were evacuated and resettled in council houses on the new Wimpey estate at Broseley.

Contemporary reports said affected homeowners had no right to compensation, and a public appeal was launched on their behalf by the mayor of Much Wenlock.

How it was reported

Why did Jackfield slip?

At the time, most people blamed water in the abandoned clay workings. The last pumps in the disused clay mines behind the village stopped in 1939; the workings then filled to the brim, some three hundred feet above the houses, and the supporting pillars of clay were thought to have collapsed. Leaking mains and the absence of proper drainage from the land above were blamed for the rest. Villagers argued that if the shafts were pumped again the movement would stop.

Later investigation put the emphasis elsewhere. Professor A. W. Skempton, who studied the site in the 1960s, described a shallow slide in a mass of stiff, fissured clays lying at about ten degrees and saturated by winter rain — geology and water first, with mining and leaking services as possible contributors rather than the single cause.

The slide was relatively shallow, extending only 18–25 feet below the surface, but it stretched over 500 feet upslope. In places, the land moved downhill by as much as 60 feet.

This is a classic feature of the Ironbridge Gorge, which remains one of the most landslide-prone areas in Britain. Over 20 separate slides have been documented here, including others in 1925, 1931 and 1984.

The human cost

For those who lived through it, the memory was searing. Ron Miles, a Jackfield man serving in the Coldstream Guards at the time, came home on leave to find four houses on Birbick's Bank split apart and his neighbours gone.

Elsie Bradburn never saw her Post Office rebuilt. Families were scattered, the old Square by the Half Moon pub left desolate.

"It was a lovely village and it's gone," she said years later.

The watch continues

The movement did not end with the evacuations. On 6 March 1953 the Bridgnorth Journal reported that a close watch was being kept on the landslip at Jackfield. Alderman Tom Jones told Salop County Council there was no proper drainage from the land above the area, and that if this were remedied the slip would be slowed down.

Legacy

In the end, the Jackfield landslide of 1952 was both a natural disaster and a social one. It was a product of geology and weather, but also of centuries of industry and a lack of investment in prevention.

It remains a reminder that the Severn Gorge, for all its beauty, is still alive and shifting beneath us.

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Sources: Picture Post, 26 April 1952; The Sphere, 19 April 1952; Express & Star, 24 April 1952; Manchester Guardian, 10 April 1952; Bridgnorth Journal, 6 March 1953; Ironbridge Weekly Journal, 5 March 1881; British Pathé newsreel footage.