Pond lining in the Black Country

Pools with an industrial past

Brickmaking dug clay pits all over the area, and coal working left hollows that filled with water. Many of these pools are now nature reserves and parkland, but they don't always hold their level. Old fill, ground movement and cracked clay let the water go, and a lined new pond or a relined old one is often the fix.

Development brings new ponds too. Housing and business parks on reclaimed land often include a wet balancing pond, and sites where great crested newts are found may need mitigation ponds as part of the planning consent.

Lining over made ground

Black Country formations are rarely clean. Brick ends, slag, clinker and old footings appear in the base and the batters of an excavation. We check the formation your groundworker has trimmed, ask for anything sharp to come out, and lay a geotextile underlay so clinker and brick can't wear through the sheet over time.

Over contaminated ground the liner has a second job: keeping the pond water and the ground's water apart. That argues for a welded HDPE or LLDPE sheet with sealed penetrations rather than a taped or patched one.

The liners we fit here

Which sheet goes in depends on the pond's footprint, its profile, the ground below and the job the water does. We name one once we've seen the site.

• EPDM for small amenity and wildlife ponds
• LLDPE and PP for shelves, tight corners and odd shapes
• HDPE for large balancing ponds and reservoirs
• GCL for confined, gently sloped basins that want a clay bed

Seams, edges and handover

Seams are run with wedge or extrusion welders on site, and each job starts with a trial weld that is peeled, checked and logged. Inlets, outlets and pipe penetrations are sealed into the liner, and the rim is buried in an anchor trench. The weld log and our handover paperwork stay with you when we leave.

Reserves, parks and public access

A lot of Black Country water is open to the public, from country parks to canal-side pools. Work there means fencing a safe area, keeping paths open where we can, and planning lifts of heavy rolls around walkers and anglers. We agree all of that with the site manager or ranger before we arrive.

Canal reservoirs and feeder pools bring their own owners and rules; where a pond connects to the navigation, the owner's engineer sets the details and we line to them.