Qualla: Anson Engine Museum

Anson Engine Museum: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Les Cawley and Geoff Challinor liked engines the way some people like vintage cars or model trains, only the things they collected weighed several tons each. They began in the 1980s on the site of the old Anson colliery in Poynton, a pit that closed in 1935 after producing coal for more than three centuries. By the time Cawley died in 2002, the two friends had built one of the largest stationary engine collections in Europe, and Challinor decided to push on alone. Today the Anson Engine Museum runs Crossley atmospheric gas engines, Mirrlees diesels, Gardner marine engines, and a steam plant once used to power Ealing Studios. The machines are loud, hot, and oily, and almost every one of them was built within a twenty-mile circle of Poynton.

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Anson Engine Museum: A Pit Older Than the Industrial Revolution

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julie Anne Workman, CC BY-SA 3.0. The earliest written record of coal at Poynton comes from a lease dated 28 February 1589, mentioning a pit at Wourthe lately worked by one George Finche. People in the area had been pulling coal out of shallow shafts long before that. The seams outcrop east of Towers Road along t...

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Image: Julie Anne Workman | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anson Engine Museum: The Anson Pit Itself

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1847 the pit on this site was called the Anson, or Lower Anson, and it employed thirty-six men and six boys working the Gees Seam 132 yards underground. In 1853 they pushed down to the Accommodation Seam at 191 yards. The winding engine fitted in 1869 had two horizontal cylind...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Anson Engine Museum: Manchester's Engine Country

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zzztriple2000 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. By 1900 there were more than twenty stationary engine builders within twenty miles of where the museum now stands. Crossley Brothers in Openshaw took up the patents of Nicolaus Otto and Eugen Langen, becoming Britain's first serious internal combustion engine builder. Mirrlees, B...

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Image: Zzztriple2000 at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Anson Engine Museum: What Actually Runs

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Visitors arrive expecting static displays and find machines breathing. The Crossley atmospheric gas engine, the largest running example in existence, fires with a flat thump and pulls a winch as it did when it left a Bristol tar distillery. The 63-ton Ruston and Hornsby once supp...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Anson Engine Museum: Why One Hobby Mattered

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stationary engines are easy to overlook. They did not move, did not fight wars, did not carry passengers. They sat in mills and pumping stations and factory cellars, driving line shafts and grinders and lathes through long leather belts, and almost all of them were scrapped when ...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0