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. At the 2011 Census the population of the village was still included in the civil parish of Charndon.
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]
