News

We are on the hunt for fragments of china that have turned up in local gardens and allotments to incorporate into the artwork.  If you’ve dug up a fragment of an old plate digging up your spuds, or found a chip of patterned pottery weeding the dahlias we’d love them for our project.  Ideally fragments should be flat and…

Lord Mayor of Oxford, Councillor Craig Simmons popped by on his bicycle to visit us this month – our 800th visitor to the site this year. He had been invited to speak at the Urban Economy Forum 2019 in Toronto, Canada.  In order to reduce his travel footprint, rather than attend in person, he created a video…

The recent rainfall has resulted in an early start to our autumn operating season, with the hydro starting up over the last weekend in September.  Two weeks later and operation remains steady – occasionally approaching maximum output. As usual, the autumn operating season is resulting in hard work for the trash screen clearing team, as…

We were delighted to welcome a Labour Party delegation on site today for a tour of the hydro, and to learn more about the role community energy will be playing in Project LEO. They included local MP Anneliese Dodds MP (Oxford East) and Dr Alan Whitehead MP, Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change. Unusually for this…

They were literally queuing down the towpath as the clock struck 10am and the start of Osney Lock Hydro’s Open Doors session.  In total we welcomed 176 visitors of all ages on to the site to learn more about our project and see the powerhouse first hand.

We were delighted to welcome Environment Agency staff, usually based in the Wallingford office,  down to the hydro yesterday as part of their corporate volunteer day to help improve Oxford and its waterways. The five-strong team normally focus on supporting the Environment Agency’s Area Leadership Team, but yesterday they got to grips with tackling graffiti, litter-picking,…

What an amazing weekend. A huge thank you to the  many volunteers, artists and meanderers who helped make such a success of our event.

Join us this weekend for a Midsummer Meander – our river themed celebration taking place all around West Oxford. Right across the community, people are getting creative, with over 20 locations signed up, and getting crafty in preparation for the weekend event.   Download your free map A downloadable map of the participating locations is now available online here. Please note last minute…

We were delighted to share our story with Tony Robinson as he made his way down stream as part of his latest series The Thames: Britain’s Greatest River which airs on Channel Five this evening. As well as showing him around the hydro, we put Tony to work clearing the trash screen.  The volunteer team…

We are thrilled to announce we have been awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £9900 for an exciting heritage project, Osney Lock Hydro: Unlocking The Power of Our River. Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the project supports a series of community based arts projects that celebrate the links between the…

We are very excited to be one of the many community energy projects across Oxfordshire that will be participating in Project LEO – Local Energy Oxfordshire. The project has been awarded £13.8m from the UK Government Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, managed by Innovate UK, and will be supported by £26m of private funding from the…

With still some days to go to the end of the financial year, we have met our average generation target for the year. Our annual generation target is 179,000 kWh, representing the annual target we hope to achieve in a typical year, enough to power 55 homes. However, hydro generation is very dependent on rain fall, so…