Calvert, Buckinghamshire
Coordinates: 51°54′52″N 1°00′06″W / 51.91452°N 1.00166°W
Calvert is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, near the village of Steeple Claydon.
Originally named after a wealthy local family, the village was founded as a hamlet in the Victorian era to house workers for the brick works that were constructed in the area. The Calvert Brickworks was opened in 1900 by Arthur Werner Itter, a brickmaker from the Peterborough area, but have since been closed in 1991 [1] and turned into a nature reserve and landfill. All that remains of the hamlet is a small group of red brick terrace houses.
In 1899 the Great Central Railway built its main line to London Marylebone past the village and opened Calvert railway station.[2] British Railways closed the station in 1964.
At the start of the 21st century a new housing estate has been built called Calvert Green,[3] greatly enlarging the original village. In 2007 Calvert Green was detached from Charndon and formed into a new civil parish.
Three of the former clay pits for the brickworks have become flooded. One is called Grebe Lake, and is used for sailing,[4] boating, angling and kayaking. One is called Itter's Pit,[5] and is used for angling, mainly for carp and pike by the Calvert Angling Club, but also contains perch, roach, rudd and catfish. The other pit is a nature reserve for wildfowl.
Another of the clay pits is now a landfill site.[6] Waste is collected from Bristol, Bath and London each day and transported using rail via Aylesbury to Calvert.[7] The site has a power station capable of producing 14 MWe of electricity from landfill gas, coming from the decomposition of organic matter to convert it into renewable electricity MW.[8]
