I cannot imagine what James Brindley would have made of Tom Weston.
Brindley was of course one of the great pioneers of the English canal system. Gutsy and determined he was a civil engineer of extraordinary talent. Innovation in pursuit of problem solving was his stock in trade. He was creative and imaginative. And a fine businessman. He worked on the building of the Bridgewater Canal regarded as Britain’s first modern canal which triggered ‘an explosion of canal building’. Thereafter his work on the Trent and Mersey Canal set the template for the narrow canal system through his decision to build narrow locks.
Weston is a tribute artist. He has a band which offers concerts that portray the six decades of the music of the great Elton John…everything from Rocket Man to I’m Still Standing, and Bennie and the Jets to Crocodile Rock and Candle in the Wind.
But beyond his incredulity at the extraordinary costumes and headgear that Tom Weston adorns himself with, Brindley would have been astonished at the setting in which Weston performed last Saturday night to a packed marquee of revelling party makers at the 2024 Crick Annual Boat show – now in its twenty fourth year; that setting being Crick Marina on the Grand Union Canal just north of the 1528 yard long tunnel built by James Barnes and Benjamin Bevan in 1814.
And beyond that, Brindley would have been astonished that a canal system, for which he had been one of the greatest pioneers, would have been transformed so successfully into a national leisure system – especially as the concept of leisure for the masses did not even exist in his day.
The story of Britain’s navigable waterways is of course as fascinating as it is heroic. The following image shows, within the black shaded area, those parts of England, Wales and Scotland that were beyond fifteen miles from the sea or the 700 mile or so of navigable rivers during Elizabethan times – that is circa 1600. That ’15 miles’ being the maximum distance over which land transport was cost effective.
Critical to the competitiveness of industry was the ability to get fuel, that is coal, raw materials in and products away. That is why canals became so critical: they offered the opportunity to greatly extend the navigable river system, and therefore the moving heavy loads efficiently and, in those days, swiftly deep into the heart of the country.
The impact that civil engineering had had in terms of extending the navigable river system can be seen by the reduced extent of the black shaded area in the image below. It represents the situation at circa 1760 by which time some 1,300 miles of navigable rivers was available for the transport of raw materials and finished products to and from factories and the coastal ports. Opening up the area within the red line around the area south of Manchester would provide the main impetus for the drive to build a national network of canals to which James Brindley’s contribution would of course be invaluable.
In terms of projects Brindley’s legacy was extraordinary and also included the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal, the Coventry Canal, the Oxford Canal, the Barto Aqueduct and the 3,000 yard long Harecastle Tunnel. And it must be remembered that these projects were delivered without modern equipment such as the JCB, without computers or satellite equipment for determining levels and the optimum routing of canals….and without modern project management – there was no room for those without either the knowledge or skill to contribute.
Economics drove it all: was it better to follow the contours and take the long route or cut through the hillside courtesy of a thousand navvies? Was it cheaper to tunnel or, through multiple locks, go over? The sheer scale of the ambition and enterprise was amazing, and goes far beyond the locks and tunnels…..there were reservoirs, weirs, and water management provisions that often extended miles either side of a lock.
The dimensional disciplines of these pioneering works were again critical to economy in terms of both capital and operating costs: everything paired back to the inch: narrow boats 6 foot 10 inches wide fitting single or double into locks with barely inches to spare. Likewise, tunnels, bridges over the canals, towpaths, and magnificent aqueducts across valleys. Some of this precision is captured in the images below showing a brick bridge and lock steps on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, and the narrowboat entering one of the locks of the Bratch Staircase on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal.
And, of course, rich cultures emerged within the working communities that would operate these boats, which frequently carried wives and children, as shown below.
Above all, the canals had been created as a working system to aid industry and trade and there had never been any concept of pleasure boats or holidays. So the arrival of the railways, whose speed of delivery allowed the manufacturers to reach market and thus recover their investment with profit more quickly, saw the sombre death knell for canals and by the latter part of the nineteenth century the system had begun to languish in seemingly eternal decline.
Until that is the navigable waterways came into public ownership through the National Transport Act of 1948. Nobody of course had the faintest idea what to do with such an obviously useless and apparently redundant system. Until, that is, Eric de Maré and his pioneering effort to bring to the public’s attention the potential of the canals.
In the summer of 1948, he loaded a caravan onto an ex-army pontoon powered by paddle wheels and, with his wife, set off on a round tour from Hampton Court up to Llangollen and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in North Wales, then back again through the Midlands. That is pretty well the entire length of the canal system. Most of his photographs, some of which are shown herein, and the account of his ‘revelatory and fascinating’ journey, were incorporated into an expanded version of the Architectural Review in July 1949, later to be incorporated into a book which the Architectural Press would publish in 1950.
Within its final chapter, Maré contemplated what could be done with the canals and herein he suggested that they might have ‘other uses (including) holidays and pleasure’. I quote from his delightful albeit now antiquated prose:
‘…..This is important to certain Imponderables, such as health and happiness, which cannot be measured in financial terms. But even here the commercial mind can take heart for, if properly organized to do so, the waterways could bring considerable profits from pleasure boating alone, both from those who prefer uncongested holiday resorts and from foreign visitors who wish to see the country from a new and exceptionally attractive angle. The ‘extraordinary success of the Norfolk broads for pleasure boating provide a precedent.’
Within his book, which was republished in 1987, are two delightful images (reproduced below) by Gordon Cullen who would later write a seminal text on urban design, The Concise Townscape, and who would go on to provide beautiful imagery for the LDDC in which he envisioned back in the early ‘80s the transformations that could take place in London’s docklands.
The first image offers a suggestion of how to treat an urban canal ‘where the local pub steps down to a waterside terrace’, the second ‘the way a canal in the country might be treated’. The innovative transformation and inspirational qualities of this thinking and these images, produced during the dismal austerity in the immediate aftermath of World War II, cannot be overstated. Canals then usually ran through rather risky parts of town and, as I remember, were dank and dangerous zones. Cullen set a vision which would guide the transformation not only of the canals and towpaths, but also of a thousand regeneration schemes for which Urban Splash and Tom Bloxham would become pioneers.
In contrast to the Elton John extravaganza offered by John Weston, I also attended a talk by Dean Davies entitled ‘The Challenges of Maintaining a 200-year-old Waterway’. Davies is an incredible man, passionate about the waterways, and a natural engineer who would have been at home as Brindley’s Chief Officer. A senior member of the Canal and River Trust’s team, he talked for 45 minutes to slides, without notes, but with a fluency and passion that was infectious. We heard about the maintenance programmes for reservoirs, dredging, and lock-gates, and about minimising ‘stoppages’, maintaining towpaths, emergency works, and the annual programming of projects.
All in all a brilliant talk but through it a sobering message: this wonderful leisure heritage, enjoyed by cyclists, fisherman and walkers who use the towpaths; and by holidaymakers and those who live on boats, has a combined value of £6.1 billion including, apparently, cost savings to the NHS of £1.1 billion consequent on the active use of towpaths for exercise. All leveraged off a £52.6 million annual grant from the government. But austerity has struck, and that grant is to be cut by 10% each year for the next five years which will take it down to £25 million – or in real terms circa £15 million allowing for inflation.
But here is the rub: the system of around 2,700 miles of navigable waterways was built on the back of industry. Redundant, it was effectively gifted to the nation through nationalisation, and thereafter regenerated through the vision of the likes of Eric de Maré and the promotion of visionary Architectural Review editors and editorial board members such as James Maude Richards and Nikolaus Pevsner. And thereafter it has been maintained by the likes of Dean Davies and his colleagues. But it is again in danger for without adequate investment it will rot beyond viable repair.
I am sure that from entirely different perspectives both James Brindley and Tom Weston would agree that to lose such a national treasure would surely be a madness.