Britain's enduring love affair with its canals
What is about canals? Actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales have made eight TV series about their canal journeys around the world, while Aboard! The Canal Trip, a two-hour, real-time journey down the Kennett & Avon with no commentary on BBC Four, attracted half a million viewers.
Now tattooed historian Dan Jones has arrived with a new three-parter, Building Britain’s Canals, starting on Channel 5 tonight. He believes it’s all down to a celebration of “British engineering genius and our enduring fascination with man-made waterways.”
Slow-paced and tranquil, canals offer a particular way of exploring Britain either on a narrow boat or by walking along the towpath. There are still some 2,000 miles of navigable inland waterways in the UK (at its height in the 1800s, there were around 4,500 miles), but Jones is only concerned with three of them, and he begins with the best known, the Grand Union Canal (the Leeds & Liverpool and Avon & Kennett will follow).
The facts tumble out in the opening episode as Jones marvels at the engineering achievements in building the Grand Union (it only took that name in 1929 when seven separate linked canals were brought under one umbrella) which joined Birmingham (35 miles of canals – around 10 more than Venice) with London in a 152-mile route (with 166 locks) making it the longest man-made waterway in the country. “It was like one super-highway,” says Jones, “a sort of 19th century HS2.”
Jones harks back to the late 1770s as the start of “canal mania” and the desire to link Birmingham, then the biggest manufacturing town in the world, with London. It’s a story of forward-thinking engineers such as James Brindley and William Jessop and extraordinary constructions like the 1.7-mile Blisworth Tunnel in Northamptonshire (the widest freely navigable tunnel in Europe), and the impressive Iron Trunk Aqueduct at Cosgrove built in 1811 to carry the canal over the River Ouse near Milton Keynes – “it’s like a giant tin bath suspended 30 feet in the air but strong enough to carry tons of water and two narrowboats at the same time.” Then there is the 21 locks of Hatton Flight in Warwickshire, which rises 45 metres in 2.5 miles, known as the “Stairway to Heaven”.
We hear too of the human cost of building the canals (14 lives lost on one occasion), how “leggers” propelled canal boats through Blisworth Tunnel (lying on their backs they pushed against the tunnel wall with their legs to propel the boat; there was no towpath) and the hardy navigators (navvies) who had the backbreaking task of creating the canals (they got paid three times as much as farmers, however). Jones goes on to tell of the bitter rivalry with railway companies, the decline of the canals for commercial use, nationalisation and the rise in pleasure activities on the waterways.
Surprisingly, Jones says that messing about on canals isn’t a recent phenomena as he produces a book entitled Two Girls on a Barge dating from 1891 which tells how “two women converted a boat into a holiday home and set off down the Grand Junction Canal – much to the astonishment of onlookers”.
With narrow boat cruising as popular as ever today, one of the best ways of exploring them is via Canal Holidays, which offers narrowboat trips along various routes (long and short) on all three canals mentioned in the series, and they have skippered day-trips too, while the Canal & River Trust (canalrivertrust.org.uk) has a comprehensive guide to cycling and walking routes should you not fancy taking on a barge. The Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne in Northamptonshire has numerous insights into the Grand Union’s history as does the London Canal Museum set in a former ice house dating from the 1860s by the Regent’s Canal and Battlebridge Basin.
The Grand Union and the other canals in the series may have been given new life and be far removed from their intended function, but the engineers who helped built it them would surely be impressed with how they have adapted.
Building Britain’s Canals, Channel 5, Friday 8.00pm
