Sharpness Docks

Sharpness Docks Location

Sharpness Docks are located where the Sharpness and Gloucester Canal meets the River Severn. It’s where ships leave the Severn to head up to Gloucester on the canal. There are also docking facilities for shipping to load/unload. It is now quite run down but back in the day it was a thriving operation with railway connections to the GWR, ship repair facilities and some impressive dock cranes.

A Walk Around Sharpness Docks

When we lived in Gloucestershire, I used to visit Sharpness Docks with my photography club and it was a location that we could reach easily for an evening shoot in the summer when the days were long enough. It’s been a while since I was there, and last week I had the chance to pay Sharpness a morning visit on the way up to Birmingham. It was a blue-sky day and the sun was low in the sky casting lovely shadows, and as long as one wasn’t facing the sun, the light on the buildings was superb. Facing the other way, it was impossible to see! Looking back over some of the images I had taken from my previous visit in August 2015, I could see they were taken at 8:00 in the evening, and the light was on the opposite side of the dock-side silos giving a completely different set of photo ops.

Ten years ago, there were two old cranes where sadly now there’s just the one. And more of the dockside is now fenced off; there are all sorts of wonderful photo ops tantalizingly out of reach on the other side of the barbed wire. It was possible to poke one’s camera lens, and ever the whole camera, through a few of the openings in the fencing and gates, but we left a little frustrated at the missed opportunities, especially where all the old boats are moored together in a jumble. Nevertheless, we had an enjoyable couple of hours photography, which was followed by a bite to eat at The Salmon Inn, Wanswell, and then an hour at the boat graveyard at Purton.

The contrast between my different visits to Sharpness Docks at different times of day and year, brought home to me the wisdom of visiting the same photo locations under differing lighting conditions.