Britain's last lighthouse keeper- with a home 30 miles from the coast on Greater Manchester canal

Phil Austin built Monton Lighthouse beside his cottage next to the Bridgewater Canal in Salford

Transcript

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.