Britain: we live on a watery island. Any map shows an intricate network of natural waterways, covering the land.
So why was there the rise of canal mania in the eighteenth century? The surging Industrial Revolution fuelled an explosion of consumer goods. But surely the existing roads and rivers could do the job of moving them from one place to another?
River Island
Well, roads in Britain were a nightmare, and had been from Roman times. There were no decent road surfaces, no central agency responsible for upkeep. No real incentives, or money, for town authorities to improve them. Journeys were long, miserable and mired in a sea of mud. River travel was an easier alternative.
Indeed, it was a fine method of transport, when the river actually takes you where you want to go. For thousands of years, they did. Or rather, the rivers dictated where the settlements and towns would develop, alongside their banks. The towns would go with the flow, literally.
The problem in the bustling new Britain of the Industrial Revolution, was that the rivers didn’t always go where you needed them to. Take a producer of goods in that emerging hotbed of industry, Birmingham. How to get their wares down to London, for onwards sales? The roads were in a dreadful, neglected state, so water transport was the alternative. But the hard put factory-owner would be scratching his head about the most direct water route. There were no direct river connections, and a long slog to the nearest sea-port.
A river runs through it
Any river journey is only as smooth as the river’s flow. Geography’s the problem. Rivers run downhill to the sea. Flat land on any river’s course allows a smooth, serene voyage. But as soon as the contour lines change, and the river starts a downhill run, the trip gets more interesting – and more dangerous. In Britain, you might not need to “shoot the rapids” like you’d do in the Rockies in America. But there are enough changes in levels to cause some jeopardy for river journeys.
There’d been early attempts to solve this problem. Weirs with “flash locks” had existed on rivers since Roman times. The main purpose of a weir was to suit that most valuable of tradesmen – the miller. A weir allows water to flow downstream, but at a controlled rate. Crucially, the controlled flow of water turned the water-mill, which turned the gears which turned the millstones, which ground the corn into bread flour. It’s a Green Dream of renewable energy.
The Miller’s tale
With the weir allowing the river to flow downstream, the miller could dam the main river with a lock gate, usually made of paddles. When a vessel wanted to sail downstream, the flash lock was opened by removing the paddles. The vessel would then descend – rapidly- on the cascading water. After it had passed through, the lock was closed, and eventually the river would reach its previous level.
How did vessels get upstream? Good question. The answer is: with a lot of effort. Usually, the vessel would be pulled by men or horses, or winched upstream using a “Capstain at land”, like this one at Hurley, on the Thames.
The trouble was, what the miller wanted and what the river traveller needed were two different things. Millers were reluctant to open the flash locks too frequently. Once opened, they’d have to wait for the river to rise and the weir flowing with water again, before they could continue their milling. Even when the safer and more efficient “pound locks” were introduced on rivers – more like the locks we see on canals today – there was the same problem of competing usage.
A long wait
So, travellers often sat for days, (and sometimes on the Thames, for months on end), negotiating with the millers and other land-based interests as to when they could actually continue their journey.
Something had to give. Especially with the growing problem of how to move the ever-increasing volume of new goods around the country. The natural waterways couldn’t be moved or improved much, but new ones could be created. Safe, level, going where they needed to go – and beyond the reach of vested river controllers. We reach the golden age of the canal.
Aqua Romana
Actually, canals had been around for a while. The Romans built a few here, but mainly to drain land and to transport clean water into the towns – they did like their baths. The Fossdyke was probably the first, channelling water from the River Trent to Lindum Colonia – or Lincoln, as we call it now. The Fossdyke along with its companion canal, the Roman Carr Dyke, both in Lincolnshire, still carry water. You’d be hard-put to recognise their Roman origins now, though.
There had been plans suggested from Elizabethan times, to try and link up the water courses between Bristol and London – effectively cutting England in half. The idea was to link the Severn to the Thames, to transport coal from the Forest of Dean to London. But the plans had never come to anything. There were too many vested interests at stake; the landowners who controlled the river navigation, and the turnpikes on the roads had too much to lose. With the pressure building to find easier routes, the floodgates opened…
First of all, in Ireland, where in 1742, a new canal carried coal from east Tyrone to Dublin, undercutting the extortionate cost of importing coal from England.
The first cut…
The English followed, initially enhancing existing river navigations. First, the Sankey Cut in Lancashire, dug out in 1757. Its purpose – to boost the traffic on its natural waterway companion, the Sankey Brook Navigation. This meant that getting coal from the St. Helens coalfields in Lancashire to the river Mersey became so much more efficient.
So efficient in fact, that the Duke of Bridgewater was aghast. He found the price of his own coal from his mines at Worsley, also in Lancashire, was being undercut on the Manchester market by cheap St. Helens’ coal. There’s nothing like competition to drive innovation. So Bridgewater, along with his agent John Gilbert, came up with a plan.
If they drilled a ground-level hole into the side of the mine, they could, with one fell swoop, drain the mine, use the water to fill a canal, and avoid having to raise the coal to the surface of the mine. A canal, linking to the river Irwell, could get their Worsley coal to Manchester at a vastly reduced cost. They estimated that one horse could tow a barge with a load of 30 tons. A single horse on the road could only pull around 3 tons. You do the maths.
There was only one problem: the vested interests of the gentlemen of commerce who controlled the tolls on the Irwell, for those last few miles. They were keen to milk their lucrative captive market. But Bridgewater and GIlbert had a secret weapon: a Derbyshire lad called James Brindley.
James Brindley, Master engineer
Brindley was a brilliant engineer, but not the best speller, as his diaries endearingly show . He agreed to “an ochilor survey or a ricconitoring” of the landscape, on behalf of the Duke. Having accepted the challenge, he noted the natural hazards in the way, and bulldozed his way through them, regardless. He built an embankment to carry the canal over the floodplains of the Irwell.
And as for the river itself: if you can’t go through it, go over it! His Barton aqueduct soared over the river, bypassing the river tolls, and carried the canal on into the heart of Manchester. Brindley’s scheme was so successful that within a year the price of coal halved on the Manchester market. Perhaps not quite the result Bridgewater anticipated, but at least everyone else was in the same boat.
The Grand Trunk
And so the golden age of canal building began, with Brindley in the vanguard. The core of his idea was the “Grand trunk”, a canal crossing the country horizontally, linking the Mersey to the Trent. But his overriding, grander vision was to build “The Grand Cross”: a canal system that would link all of the four great English rivers, the Mersey, the Trent, the Severn and the Thames. Smaller branches would sprout from these canals, reaching sites of industry off the main trunk routes. Brindley wasn’t too fond of rivers. When once asked what he thought rivers were for he replied, “to feed navigable canals”.
A glance at any modern route map of the UK’s canal system shows just how successful Brindley’s vision was. Sadly though, he didn’t live to witness its completion. Ever the practical, hands-on man, he did his own “raconitering”. Surveying out in the rain one day, he caught a chill and died soon after, in 1772. A local newspaper published this rather sweet epitaph:
Treasure trove
For the amateur historian, the ingenuity of Brindley and his successors are treasures waiting to be found. Of course, there’s the long stretches of the canals themselves, with their towpaths. The Grand Union, for example, linking Birmingham to the Thames over 137 long miles. But even more interesting is spotting how the engineers solved the problem of getting around obstacles and contours.
A river or valley to be crossed? Build an aqueduct. Brindley’s masterpiece, the Barton aqueduct across the Irwell, for instance. Or the even more impressive Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, carrying the Llangollen canal over the river Dee. It was built by that later engineering genius, Thomas Telford, completed in 1805. Its cast-iron joints were joined together with a glue of sugar boiled with Welsh flannel, all mixed with tar. Incredibly, with a nod to pagan superstition, ox’s blood was mixed with the mortar to channel the animal’s strength..
A hill in the way? Build over it. Use the power of a water source to fill locks, and so raise the level of the canal over the hump. You can’t find a better example than the Caen Hill lock system on the Kennet and Avon canal, built around 1810. The statistics are impressive: 29 locks, raising the level of the canal 237 feet over a 2 mile stretch.
A step too far
I recall a recent holiday afloat where we approached the Caen steps, as they’re called, in our narrow boat. We murmured a silent prayer that we’d read the canal map correctly. We were looking for the “winding hole” just before the steps – it’s a bulge in the canal, wide enough for narrow boats to turn round. You can imagine the relief, as we executed our 7 or 8 point turn, to head back towards Bath. We were getting very proficient at the locks, but the 6 or so hours to navigate up the Caen steps would have been a step too far.
Instead of going over a hump, you could tunnel through it. There’s the Hardcastle tunnels, on the Trent and Mersey canal. This was part of Brindley’s “Grand Trunk”, joining the ports of Hull and Liverpool, on opposite sides of the country. Two tunnels, because one succeeded the other. The original, built by Brindley, was prone to flooding, so they used steam engines, built by another great engineer of the age, James Watt, to pump out the flood water. There was no towpath, so the canal folk had to “leg” their way through the 1.5 mile tunnel, pushing the boat along with their lower limbs.
As productivity increased, Brindley’s tunnel couldn’t cope with the increased traffic. So, 40 years after the original, Thomas Telford built a wider one. You can see the pair of tunnels side by side, although only Telford’s is now used. Brindley’s tunnel collapsed around 100 years ago.
New kid on the block
Canal mania continued into the early years of the nineteenth century. Some investors made fortunes in financing canal construction. But it was hit-and-miss: they were very expensive to build. Suddenly, everything changed. Canals were certainly an improvement to the roads, but the journeys were slow. In 1830 came the first of the new kids on the block: the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. It was the first in the world to transport both passengers and goods. What a death knell for the canals. None were constructed after that, and slowly but surely over the next hundred years or so they declined. Even the navvies that built them jumped ship, and transferred their skills to the new technological miracle, the railways.
Navvies?
The canals were originally called “navigations”. The workmen who laboured, with little mechanisation to help them, were termed navigators, shortened of course, to “navvies”. They were the men who built industrial Britain, with little more than picks and shovels – the canals, the railways, and then, the roads. We have much to thank them for, and they deserve their own post…
A new lease of life
I remember our narrowboat rising with the water level from a deep lock on the Kennet and Avon. Gradually there appeared the smiling face, and then the body, of a volunteer from the Canal and River Trust. With a clipboard and a form. I was a captive audience, so duly coughed up a year’s membership. But what an heroic body they are! They have brought back to life so many miles of canals and towpaths, making navigable many waterways which had silted up. Preserving the industrial archaeology of the network. Encouraging the wildlife along these green corridors, and bringing the traffic back – this time, the leisure crafts.
Hiding in plain sight
If you, like me, have an interest in industrial archaeology, then I’d urge you to try a canal towpath walk. Or, if you’re really adventurous, try a narrowboat holiday – you spend a week travelling all of a dozen miles – but it’s wonderful. It’ll give you the chance to view the engineering feats of our Georgian and Victorian ancestors as you chug along. Even better, the slow process of negotiating the locks will allow you to see up-close just how they did it – the lock gates, the sluices, the winches, the cobbled kerbs to get a purchase, when opening and closing the lock gates. It really is watery, living history.
