History of the British canal system
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[edit] Early history
The evidence suggests that the first British canals were built in Roman times, as irrigation canals or short connecting spurs between navigable rivers, such as the Foss Dyke in Lincolnshire. See Roman Britain.
In the post-medieval period some natural waterways were 'canalised' or improved for boat traffic, such as the Exeter Canal, which opened in the 16th century. Simple flash locks were provided to regulate the flow of water and allow loaded boats to pass through shallow waters by admitting a rush of water, but these were not purpose-built canals as we understand them today.
The transport system that existed before the canals were built consisted of either coastal shipping, or horses and carts struggling along mostly un-surfaced mud roads (although there were some surfaced Turnpike roads); there was also a small amount of traffic carried along navigable rivers.
In the 17th century, as early industry started to expand, this transport situation was highly unsatisfactory. The restrictions of coastal shipping and river transport were obvious and horses and carts could only carry one or two tons of cargo at a time. The poor state of most of the roads of the period meant that the roads could often become unusable after heavy rain. Because of the small loads that could be carried, supply of essential commodities such as coal, and iron ore were limited, and this kept prices high and restricted economic growth.
[edit] The Industrial Revolution
The modern canal system was mainly a product of the 18th century and early 19th century. It came into being because the Industrial Revolution (which began in Britain during the mid-18th century) demanded an economic and reliable way to transport goods and commodities in large quantities.
By the early 18th century, river navigations (Aire and Calder Navigation) were becoming quite sophisticated, with "modern" pound locks and longer and longer "cuts" (some with intermediate locks) to avoid circuitous or difficult stretches of river. Eventually, the experience of building long cuts with their own locks gave rise to the idea of building a "pure" canal, a waterway designed on the basis of where goods needed to go, not where a river happened to be. The claim for the first pure canal is disputed between "Sankey" and "Bridgewater" supporters. (Some say that neither the Sankey, nor the Bridgewater were the first English canals, merely the first to be constructed in the Industrial Revolution 'canal mania'.)
Although nominally a scheme to make the Sankey Brook navigable, Sankey Brook Navigation has a good claim to the title of the first English "pure" canal since, it included an entirely new, artificial channel that was effectively a canal along the Sankey Brook valley. However, it was the Bridgewater Canal (less obviously associated with an existing river) that captured the popular imagination and inspired further canals.
[edit] Bridgewater Canal
In the 1760s the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who owned a number of coal mines in northern England, wanted a reliable way to transport his coal to the nearby city of Manchester, which was rapidly industrialising. He commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal to do just that. Startlingly, Brindley's design included an aqueduct carrying the canal over the River Irwell - an engineering wonder which (when the canal opened) immediately attracted tourists. The construction of this canal was funded entirely by the Duke, and was called the Bridgewater Canal. It opened in 1761 and is often considered to be the first canal of the modern era to be built in Britain:
The new canal proved highly successful. The boats on the canal were horse-drawn with a towpath alongside the canal for the horse to walk along. This horse-drawn system proved to be highly economical and became standard across the British canal network. Commercial horse-drawn canal boats could be seen on Britain's canals until as late as the 1950s (although by then steam and diesel powered boats had become more common).
The canal boats could carry 30 tons at a time with only one horse pulling - more than ten times the amount of cargo per horse that was possible with a cart. Because of this huge increase in supply, the Bridgewater canal reduced the price of coal in Manchester by nearly two-thirds within just a year of its opening. The Bridgewater was also a huge financial success, with it earning what had been spent on its construction within just a few years.
[edit] The Golden Age
This success proved the viability of canal transport, and soon industrialists in many other parts of the country wanted canals. All of Britain's canals were built in the same way as the Bridgewater canal - by an amalgamation of private individuals with an interest in improving communications. In Staffordshire, for instance, the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood saw an opportunity to bring bulky cargoes of clay to his factory doors, and to transport his fragile finished goods to market in Manchester, Birmingham or further afield by water, minimising breakages. Within just a few years of the Bridgewater's opening, an embryonic national canal network came into being, with the construction of canals such as the Oxford Canal and the Trent & Mersey Canal.
The new canal system was both cause and effect of the rapid industrialisation of the British Midlands and north. The period between the 1770s and the 1830s is often referred to as the "Golden Age" of British canals. During this period of "canal mania", huge sums were invested in canal building, and the canal system rapidly expanded to nearly 4000 miles (7000 kilometres) in length, and essentially had no external competition. However, for each canal, an Act of Parliament was necessary to authorise construction, and many rival canal companies were formed, often competing bitterly. Perhaps the best example of the inefficiencies cuaed by these rivalries is Worcester Bar in Birmingham, a point where the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and the Birmingham Canal Navigations were only one foot apart (with no technical reasons why the canals could not be connected). For many years, a dispute about tolls meant that goods travelling through Birmingham had to be unloaded from boats in one canal, and loaded onto boats in the other.
[edit] Standards
Due to reasons of economy and the constraints of 18th century engineering technology, the early canals were built to a narrow width. The standard dimension of canal locks introduced by Brindley in 1766 were 72 feet 7 inches (22.1 metres) long by 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 metres) wide. This limited the size of the boats (which came to be called narrowboats), and thus limited the quantity of the cargo they could carry to around 30 tonnes. This decision would in later years make the canal network economically uncompetitive for freight transport, and by the mid 20th century it was no longer possible to work a 30 tonne load economically.
[edit] Geography
Brindley believed it would be possible to use canals to link the four great rivers of England: the Mersey, Trent, Severn and Thames. The Trent and Mersey Canal was the first part of this ambitious network, but although he and his assistants surveyed the whole potential system, he did not live to see it completed - coal was finally transported from the Midlands to the Thames at Oxford in January 1790, 18 years after his death. Development of the network was left to other engineers, such as Thomas Telford, whose Ellesmere Canal helped link the Severn and the Mersey.
The bulk of the canal system was built in the industrial Midlands and the north of England, where navigable rivers most needed extending and heavy cargoes of manufactured goods, raw materials or coal most needed carrying. Relatively few canals were built in southern England or London, (the Grand Union Canal being an exception). The great manufacturing cities of Manchester and Birmingham were major economic drivers for the 'canal mania' which reached its peak in 1793, and both benefited from a network of canals, most of which survive. Birmingham, for example, has a greater length of canals than Venice (though in a larger area and perhaps with slightly less glamour). Manchester's merchants, dissatisfied with the service from the port of Liverpool, bypassed the Liverpool monopoly on coastal trade by converting a section of the Irwell into the ship canal.
By contrast, London was a port, served by already-navigable rivers like the Thames and the River Lee, although the Lee was canalised. It needed canals only to take goods in and out from sea-going ships, where such rivers were unavailable.
A few self-contained canals, not connected to the national system, were built in the South West of England, such as the Bude Canal and the St. Columb Canal. The same was true for south Wales. Some of these canals were short cuts: they allowed boats to move between the west and the south (and south to west) by a shorter route than following the coast.
Within Scotland, the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Union Canal connected the major cities in the industrial central belt; they also provide a short cut for boats to cross between the west and the east without a sea voyage. The Caledonian Canal provided a similar function in the Highlands of Scotland. The Crinan Canal avoided the need for a long diversion around the Kintyre peninsula, and the Glasgow, Paisley and Johnstone Canal was intended to link these three places directly to the west coast of Scotland, but never reached beyond Johnstone.
[edit] Operations
On the majority of British canals the canal-owning companies did not own or run a fleet of boats. Instead they charged private operators tolls to use the canal. From these tolls they would try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain the canal and pay back initial loans. In winter special icebreaker boats with reinforced hulls would be used to break the ice.
The boats used on canals were a mixed bunch, including flyers that carried light cargo and passengers at relatively high speed day or night, and a variety of river craft. The workhorse of the canal system, however, was the traditional narrowboat. These were owned and operated by individual carriers, or by carrying companies who would pay the helmsman a wage depending on the distance travelled, and the amount of cargo.
[edit] Gradual decline
From the 1830s, railways began to present a threat to canals, as they could not only carry more than the canals but could transport people and goods far more quickly than the walking pace of the canal boats. Most of the investment that had previously gone into canal building was diverted into railway building.
Canal companies were unable to compete against the speed of the new railways, and in order to survive they had to slash their prices. This put an end to the huge profits that canal companies had enjoyed before the coming of the railways, and also had an effect on the boatmen who faced a big drop in wages. With this drop in wages, the only way the boatmen could afford to keep their families was by taking their families with them on the boats. This became standard practice across the canal system, with in many cases families with several children living in tiny boat cabins, creating a huge community of boat people. Though this community ostensibly had much in common with Gypsies both communities strongly resisted any such comparison, and surviving boat people feel deeply insulted if described as 'water gypsies'.
By the 1850s the railway system had become well established and the amount of cargo carried on the canals had fallen by nearly two-thirds, lost mostly to railway competition. In many cases struggling canal companies were bought out by railway companies. Sometimes this was a tactical move by railway companies to gain ground in their competitors' territory, but sometimes canal companies were bought out to close them down and remove competition. A notable example of this is the Ashby-de-la-Zouch Canal in Leicestershire, which had its northern end closed down after being bought by a local railway company. Larger canal companies survived independently and were large enough to continue to make profits. The canals survived through the 19th century largely by occupying the niches in the transport market that the railways had missed, or by supplying local markets such as the coal-hungry factories and mills of the big cities.
During the 19th century in much of continental Europe the canal systems of many countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands were drastically modernised and widened to take much larger boats, often able to transport up to 2000 tonnes, compared to the 30 to 100 tonnes that was possible on the much narrower British canals. As it is only economic to transport freight by canal if this is done in bulk, the widening ensured that in many of these countries, canal freight transport is still economically viable.
This canal modernisation never occurred on a large scale in Britain, partly because of the power of the railway companies who feared competition, and successfully blocked any attempt to modernise the canals. Thus almost uniquely in Europe, many of Britain's canals remain as they have been since the 18th and 19th century: mostly operated with narrowboats less than 7 feet (2.3 m) wide and 70 feet (23 m) long (although in parts of the country slightly larger canals were constructed, called 'broad' or 'wide' canals, which could take boats that were 14 feet wide and 70 feet long). A major exception to this stagnation was the Manchester Ship Canal, built in the 1890s using the existing River Irwell and River Mersey, to take ocean-going ships into the centre of Manchester via its neighbour Salford.
The canal network gradually declined. During the early 20th century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, many minor canals were abandoned due to falling traffic. However the main network saw brief surges in use during the First and Second World Wars and still carried a substantial amount of freight until the early 1950s.
The canal system and most inland waterways were nationalised in 1948, along with the railways, under the British Transport Commission, whose subsidiary Docks and Inland Waterways Executive managed them into the 1950s. During the 1950s and 1960s freight transport on the canals declined rapidly in the face of mass road transport, and several more canals were abandoned during this period.
Under the Transport Act of 1962, the canals were transferred in 1963 to the British Waterways Board (BWB), now British Waterways, and the railways to the British Railways Board (BRB). In the same year a remarkably harsh winter saw many boats frozen into their moorings, and unable to move for weeks at a time. This was one of the reasons given for the decision to formally cease commercial carrying on the canals. By this time the canal network had shrunk to just 2000 miles (3000 kilometres), half the size it was at its peak in the early 19th century.
[edit] Restoration
Though commercial use of Britain's canals declined after World War II, recreational use increased as people had more leisure time and disposable income. This led to the establishment of a group called the Inland Waterways Association. Formed by L. T. C. Rolt and Robert Aickman, this organization has revived interest in Britain's canals. In the past few decades, many hundreds of miles of abandoned canal have been restored, as British Waterways has come to see the economic and social potential of canalside development.
There has also been a movement to redevelop canals in inner city areas such as Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham, which have both numerous waterways and urban blight. In these cities, waterways redevelopment provides a focus for successful commercial/residential developments such as Castlefields Basin in Manchester, Victoria Quays in Sheffield and Gas Street Basin in Birmingham. However, these developments may adversely impact the industrial archaeology of the canals. Nevertheless, interest in the waterways has grown in recent years, and small scale freight transport has begun on some canals.
[edit] See also
- Canals of the United Kingdom for a list of Britain's canals
- UK topics
