The
canals of the United Kingdom are a major part
of the network of inland
waterways in the United
Kingdom. They have a colourful history, from use for irrigation
and transport, through becoming the focus of the
Industrial Revolution, to today's role
for recreational boating.
Despite a period of abandonment, today the
canal system in the United Kingdom
is again in increasing use, with abandoned and
derelict canals being reopened, and the construction of some new
routes.
History of commercial carrying
Traditional working canal boats
Canals first saw use during the Roman
occupation of the south 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.
The United Kingdom's navigable water network grew massively 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
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 constructed
between industrial centres, cities and ports, and were soon
transporting 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 technology allowed canals to be improved. The early canals
contoured round hills and valleys, later ones went straighter.
Locks took canals up and down hills, and they 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 (7 ft)
bridges and locks. As trains, and later road vehicles, became more
advanced, they became cheaper than the narrow canal system, being
faster, and able to carry much larger cargoes. The canal network
declined, and many canals were bought by railway companies - in
some cases to enable them to penetrate rival companies' areas
transhipping to/from canal boats. Some 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 nineteen
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 steam and later diesel powered boats towing an
unpowered butty, and many of the boatmen's families 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 commercial carrying
on the narrow canals was sounded in the winter of 1962-1963, when a
long hard frost kept goods icebound on the canals for three months.
A few of the remaining customers turned to road and rail haulage to
ensure reliability of supply and never returned, though both rail
and road had been severely disrupted by the frost and snow too.
Other narrow boat traffics gradually ceased with the change from
coal to oil, the closure of canalside factories, and run down of
British heavy industry. The last long distance narrow boat
traffics, coal from the midlands to Dickinson's paper mills at
Croxley and the Kearley & Tongue Jam Factory at Southall both
ceased in 1970 - the Croxley mills had changed to oil and the Jam
Factory closed for re-location. Regular narrow boat traffics
continued, however, lime juice from Brentford to Boxmoor (until
1981) while aggregates were carried on the River Soar until 1988.
Some individual waterways (especially the Manchester Ship Canal,
the Aire & Calder Navigation and the other large
waterways)remain viable, carrying many millions of tonnes per year
and there are still hopes for development, but "
Containerisation" of ports and lorries has
mostly passed the waterways by.
The last major investment development of the
inland waterways was the enlargement of the Sheffield and
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
aboard a ship, and up to Doncaster
. Today there have been a number of
successful initiatives to get more traffic on to the larger inland
waterways, though even the Manchester Ship Canal does not convey
cargo ships to the docks in Salford, which have become little more
than a 'water feature' for the apartments, offices and cultural
institutions of 'Salford Quays' that have replaced the wharves and
warehouses.
Growth of leisure use
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
L. T. C. 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 of fledgling weekly
boat-hire companies, following the example of such companies on the
Norfolk Broads, which had long been
used for leisure boating. The authority responsible for the canals,
British Waterways Board,
encouraged this process from the late 1950s by operating a fleet of
holiday hire boats, initially converted from cut down working
boats.
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 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
authorities.
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 consideration,
and one under construction (the
Fens
Waterways Link) 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.
Present status
There are now thousands of miles of navigable canals and rivers
throughout the United Kingdom.
Most of them are linked into a single English
and Welsh network from Bristol 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 7 ft wide) no longer than about
56 feet. There are also several through-routes not connected
to the main network, notably those in Scotland, e.g.
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
six million tonnes by 2010 by transporting large amounts of waste
to disposal facilities.
The speed limit for the majority of inland waterways in the United
Kingdom managed by British Waterways is four
miles per hour, whilst on some larger
waterways the limit is increased to six miles per hour. All speed
measurements on BW waterways are expressed in terms of speed over
the ground, rather than speed through the water.
List of canals
Canal features
Aqueducts
Canal
aqueducts are structures that carry
the canal across a valley, road or railway.
Dundas Aqueduct is built of stone in a
classical style.
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct
is an iron trough on tall stone piers.
Barton Swing Aqueduct opens to
let ships pass underneath on the Manchester Ship Canal.
Locks
Locks are the most common means of
raising or lowering a boat from one water level to another. The
distinguishing feature of a lock is a fixed chamber whose
water-level can be changed.
Where a
large height difference has to be overcome, locks are built close
together in a flight such as
at Caen Hill
Locks
. Where the gradient is very steep, a set of
staircase locks are
sometimes used, like Bingley Five Rise Locks
. At the other extreme
stop locks have little or no change in
level but were built to conserve water where one canal joined
another.
An interesting example is King's
Norton Stop Lock
which was built with guillotine gates.
See also List of canal locks in
the United Kingdom.
See
List of
canal tunnels in the United Kingdom
Canal boats
Canal museums
Canal engineers
See also
References
External links
, 2.2 m to 4.3 m beam)
and the Bridgewater
Canal.
Arm of the Shrewsbury
Canal)
and the Grand
Western Canal)
, Gloucester
, Northamptonshire
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