Canals of Great Britain

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For canals of Northern Ireland see the Canals of Ireland article

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[edit] History of commercial carrying

See History of the British canal system for a more detailed history.

Traditional working canal boats
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Traditional working canal boats

Canals first saw use during the Roman occupation of Great Britain, and were used mainly for irrigation. However, the Romans did create several navigable canals, such as Foss Dyke, to link rivers, enabling increased transportation inland by water.

Great Britain's navigable waterway network was steadily increased (by making existing rivers navigable, rather than cutting canals), but grew massively in the 18th century as the demand for industrial transport increased. The canals were key to the pace of the Industrial Revolution: roads at the time were unsuitable for large volumes of traffic. A system of very large pack horse trains had developed, but few roads were suitable for large wheeled vehicles able to transport large amounts of materials (especially fragile manufactured goods such as pottery) quickly. Canal boats were very much quicker, could carry large volumes, and were much safer for fragile items. Following the success of the Bridgewater Canal (the first modern artificial canal in Britain), other canals were quickly constructed between industrial centres, cities and ports, and were soon transporting vast amounts of raw materials (esp coal and lumber) and manufactured goods. There were immediate benefits to households, as well as to commerce: in Manchester, the cost of coal fell by 75% when the Bridgewater Canal arrived.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold in the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, the canals enjoyed great success and underwent various technological changes. Early canals "contoured" round hills and valleys, later ones went straighter, as locks took them up and down hills, and the more modern canals strode across valleys on taller and longer aqueducts and through hills in longer and deeper tunnels.

However, from the mid 19th century, railways began to replace canals, especially those built with the standard narrow (7ft) bridges and locks. As trains, and later road vehicles, became more advanced, they became more economically viable than canal boats, being faster, cheaper to run, and able to carry much larger cargoes. The canal network declined, and many canals were bought by railway companies. Narrow canals became unusable, filled with weeds, silt and rubbish, or converted to railways.

There was a late burst of wide-waterway building (eg the Caledonian Canal, and the Manchester Ship Canal), and of invention and innovation by people such as Bartholomew of the Aire and Calder company, who conceived the trains of 19 coal-filled "Tom Pudding" compartment boats that were pulled along the Aire and Calder Navigation from the Yorkshire coalfields, and lifted bodily to upturn their contents directly into seagoing colliers at Goole Docks (their descendants, Hargreaves' tugs pushing three coal-pans trains to be upended into hoppers at the Aire power stations lasted as late as 2004). However, the last new canal before the end of the 20th century was the New Junction Canal in Yorkshire (now South Yorkshire) in 1905. As competition intensified, horse-drawn single narrowboats were replaced by diesel powered boats towing an unpowered butty, and the boatman's family abandoned their shore homes for a life afloat, to help with boat handling and to reduce accommodation costs - the birth of the legendary "boatman's cabin" with bright white lace, gleaming brass and gaily-painted metalware.

Constant lowering of tolls meant that the carriage of some bulky, non-perishable, and non-vital goods by water was still feasible on some inland waterways - but the death knell for the canal system as a viable commercial network was sounded in the winter of 1947, when a long hard frost kept goods icebound on the canals for many weeks, and most of the remaining customers turned to the road and rail haulage industry to ensure reliability of supply. Some individual waterways (especially the Manchester Ship Canal) remained viable, and there were still hopes for development, but "Containerisation" of ports and lorries mostly passed the waterways by. The last major investment development of the inland waterways was the enlargement of the South Yorkshire Navigation in the early 1980s to cope with barges of standard European dimensions that (in the depression of the 80s) never came. The scale of the futile hopes of those days can be appreciated by the occupants of a holiday narrowboat nearly lost in a lock built for the barges that were going to sail down the Rhine, across the North Sea, and up to Doncaster.

[edit] Growth of leisure use

The Oxford Canal near Rugby
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The Oxford Canal near Rugby

In the latter half of the 20th century, while the use of canals for transporting goods was dying out, there was a rise in interest in their history and potential use for leisure. A large amount of credit for this is usually given to LTC Rolt, whose book "Narrowboat" about a journey made in nb Cressy was published in 1944. A key development was the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association, and the establishment by some boatyards of a fledgling weekly-boat-hire companies, following the example of such companies on the Norfolk Broads, which had long been used for leisure boating.

Holidaymakers began renting 'narrowboats' and roaming the canals, visiting towns and villages they passed. Other people bought boats to use for weekend breaks and the occasional longer trip. The concept of a canal holiday became even more familiar when the large agencies that dealt with Broads holidays began to include canal boatyards in their brochures. Canal-based holidays became popular due to their relaxing nature, self-catering levels of cost, and huge variety of scenery available; from inner London to the Scottish Highlands. This growth in interest came just in time to give local canal societies the ammunition they needed to combat government proposals in the 1960s to close commercially-unviable canals, and to resist pressure from local authorities and newspapers to "Fill In this eyesore" or even to "Close the Killer Canal" (when someone fell in one). It was not long before enthusiastic volunteers were repairing unnavigable but officially-open canals and moving on to restore officially-closed ones and demonstrating their renewed viability to the authotities. It is said that the real breakthrough came when the British Waterways Board came to realise that income from the licence of a leisure boat is just as real as income from a "real" working boat.

Local authorities began to see how a cleaned-up and well-used waterway was bringing visitors to other towns and waterside pubs(not just boaters, but people who just like being near water and watching boats (see gongoozler). They began to clean up their own watersides, and to campaign for "their" canal to be restored. As a result of this growing revival of interest, there are now even some new routes under construction for the first time in a century, linking navigable rivers and existing canals. Large projects such as the restoration of the spectacular Anderton Boat Lift, or the building of the startling Falkirk Wheel attracted development funding from the European Union and from the Millennium Fund. A project called the Jubilee River, which diverts flood waters from the River Thames in Berkshire, is already open but it was designed to look and act like a natural river, and it is not generally counted as a new canal.

[edit] Present status

There are now thousands of miles of navigable canals and rivers throughout Great Britain. Most of them are linked into a single English and Welsh network from Bath to London, Liverpool to Goole, and Lancaster to Ripon, and connecting the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the estuaries of the Humber, Thames, Mersey, River Severn, and River Ribble. This network is navigable in its entirety by a narrowboat (a boat 7ft wide) no longer than about 56 feet. There are also several significant through-routes not connected to the main network (eg Glasgow to Edinburgh via the Falkirk Wheel, and Inverness to Fort William via Loch Ness.

The aim of campaigning bodies such as the Inland Waterways Association is to persuade British Waterways (which owns about half of Britain's inland waterway network) to fully reopen all disused canals. In May 2005 The Times reported that British Waterways was hoping to quadruple the amount of cargo carried on Britain's canal network to 6 million tonnes by 2010 by transporting large amounts of waste to disposal facilities.

[edit] Current threats to the canal system

A recent (August 2006) announcement of a budget cut for British Waterways has worried some that development of new waterways, and even maintenance of existing canals might suffer. Alternatively, fees for licences paid by boaters and marinas may rise sharply. One legal problem is that some currently-open waterways still officially only have "remainder" status, so a cash-strapped BW would have no legal obligation to maintain them. Another issue affecting the future of the canal system is whether the UK government will ask the EU for an extension of the "derogation" from the EU rule on fuel tax on private pleasure boats. Unless the government applies for this (and the EC grants it) then canal boats will become ineligible for low-taxed "red" diesel. If canal boats became subject to the same relatively high fuel taxes as motorists then the popularity of canal holidays might decline: for instance, if hire companies might feel that they could no longer afford to subsidise high-speed and high-mileage boaters by "including free fuel" - and to charge fuel as an "extra" would be unpopular with potential hirers.

[edit] List of Canals

The following list includes some systems that are navigable rivers with sections of canal (eg Aire and Calder Navigation) as well as "completely" artificial canals (eg Rochdale Canal).

[edit] Canals in England

[edit] Canals in Scotland

[edit] Canals in Wales

[edit] Canals that have been abandoned or are currently not navigable

[edit] Proposed canal routes

  • Grand Union Canal (Slough Branch)

Extending Slough arm of the Grand Union Canal south to join the River Thames.

  • York stream (Maidenhead)

Making the York stream fully navigable for boats and linking to other nearby canals and navigable rivers.

  • Bedford and Milton Keynes Waterway

Connection from Grand Union Canal at Milton Keynes to the River Great Ouse at Bedford.

  • Warwick

Connection from River Avon to Grand Union Canal via Warwick.

  • London to Portsmouth

At various times in history, proposals were made for a secure inland route from the capital London to the headquarters of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth to be constructed, which would allow craft to move between the two without having to venture out into the English Channel and possibly encounter enemy ships. There is no naturally navigable route between the two cities, resulting in several proposals. See London to Portsmouth canal.

[edit] Canal features

[edit] Aqueducts

[edit] Boat lifts

[edit] Inclined planes

[edit] Locks

[edit] Tunnels

[edit] Canal boats

  • Bastard boats or Statters (12' / 3.65 m beam; wide boats on Manchester, Bolton & Bury)
  • Broad-beam boats (called "wide boats" on the Grand Union canal, 2.2 m to 4.3 m beam)
  • Fly boats (long and short; on Aire & Calder)
  • Keels (on Aire & Calder)
  • Long boats (narrow boats used on Severn)
  • Narrowboats or Narrow Boats (approx. 7' / 2.13 m beam; originally working boats on Midlands canals; now mostly pleasure boats)
  • Severners (used on the River Severn)
  • Short boats (on Northern canals such as Leeds & Liverpool, Calder & Hebble, Aire & Calder)
  • Sloops (on Aire & Calder)
  • Trench boats (for 6' / 1.83 m locks on the Trench Arm of the Shrewsbury Canal)
  • Tub boats (used on various canals including Bude canal and the Grand Western canal)
  • White boats (on Aire & Calder canal; with white side decks for working at night)
  • Wide-beam narrowboats (more than 4.3 m beam)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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