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It is
the Chinese rather than the British that can claim to be the early
pioneers of canal building, with the Grand Canal of China in the
tenth century. Even the familiar pound lock still used in Britain
today is said to have been invented by Chhiao Wei-Yo, in the year
983. In most instances however, these early canals were merely
extensions to natural rivers.
Almost
a millennium earlier however, Roman engineers in Britain had built
the Fossdyke connecting Lincoln to the River Trent around AD50, for
both drainage and navigation purposes. They also constructed Caer
Dyke.
 In
relatively modern times the Exeter Canal was built in 1566: this
bypassed part of the river making navigation easier. The canal was
fitted with the first pond locks in Britain, with the now familiar
lifting vertical gates.
Other
early British canals include a section of the River Welland in
Lincolnshire, built in 1670; the Stroudwater Navigation,
Gloucestershire, completed in 1779; and the Sankey Canal in
Lancashire, which opened in stages between 1757 – 1773.
It was however during the second half of the
eighteenth century that
the
great age of canal building started with the construction of the
Bridgewater Canal. This was a time when
Britain
was bursting with trade, industry and commerce.
Manufacturing had already begun to change, from local
craftsmen working in cottage industries to the mills and factories
where goods could be mass produced by machines. The factory system
imposed a discipline on the workforce which had not previously
existed. Set hours and shift patterns established an environment
where the workforce could be more easily supervised.
Good communications became vital in order to move raw
materials to the factories, and from those same factories, the
finished products to the consumer. And not just to consumers in
Britain, but throughout the expanding British Empire. Roads were
also being constructed and improved, but they couldn’t easily handle
heavy and bulky materials like coal and steel, or delicate and
fragile materials like pottery. Roads also could not
compete with water, where one horse could pull fifty tons of cargo
in a boat.
At this time there were over a thousand miles of
navigable rivers in Britain, but the problem was, they didn’t go to
the right places anymore …the industrial north and the Midlands were not
connected with the consumer-based south, nor the ports through which
their goods could be exported.
Enter the wealthy young Francis Egerton, the third
Duke of Bridgewater, fresh from his Grand Tour of Europe where he
had visited the 150 mile long French navigation, the Canal du Midi,
completed some years earlier in 1681. It was in 1759
that the Duke decided to build a short canal to link his coal mines
at Worsley with the River Irwell, which led directly into
Manchester, a big industrial city with an increasing appetite for
coal to both power the mills and warm the workers.
The
Duke outlined the plans with one of his estate managers, John
Gilbert, and together they brought in an engineer James Brindley
who had already established a reputation working with water power,
to manage the detail of the construction. Completed in 1776, the
Bridgewater Canal was the catalyst that started half a century of
canal building.
The
Bridgewater Canal was never linked to the River Irwell as originally
planned, but by-passed it, taking the coal
from the
tunnels driven deep into the Duke’s mines at Worsley,
directly into Manchester. With this one astute move they avoided
paying tolls to the Irwell Navigation, coal prices in Manchester
were halved almost overnight, the Duke became even richer and the
furnaces of the Industrial Revolution burned ever brighter.
Brindley was now in great demand and moved on to build even longer
navigations spanning the length and the breadth of the country,
establishing himself as the leading canal engineer of his, and
perhaps of all, time. He is largely associated with the building of
the so-called "Grand Cross", two thousand miles of canals which
linked the four great rivers of England, the Severn, the Mersey, the
Humber, and the Thames.
There
were two concentrated periods of canal building, from 1759 to the
early 1770's and from 1789 to almost the end of the eighteenth
century.
In the
first period, canals were built to serve the heavy industry of the
north and midlands. Meanwhile other regions of England like the mill towns and
cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the Staffordshire Potteries and
the Black Country in the Midlands were developed and became wealthy as a
result of their canal systems.
It was
not until 1793 that an Act was passed to authorise the construction
of the Grand Junction Canal from Braunston on the Oxford Canal to
Brentford on the River Thames, just west of London. London itself was
not connected directly to the national canal network until 1801.
Funding for these massive infrastructure projects
were mainly raised through private venture capital, with
most share options being heavily over-subscribed. Promotional
meetings were often held in secret, in order to keep the profits in
the right pockets. Many canals made significant profits, but some
never made a penny for shareholders, and others like the Dorset and
Somerset Canal were simply abandoned during construction.
By the end of the eighteenth century the boom was
over, and most British canals were completed by 1815. Within ten
years the smart money had moved into those new fangled railway
schemes.
At first the canals and railways coexisted, the
railways concentrating on transporting passengers and light goods
and the canals on moving the bulky and heavy goods. But by the
middle of the nineteenth century, the railways had been
formed into an integrated national network. Such stern competition
forced canal tolls down, sending the companies into a decline from
which they would never emerge.
 After years of neglect and the damage caused by the
World War II, Britain’s canal and railway systems were nationalised
by the government in 1947. The 1950’s and 1960’s saw a resurgence in
the use of canals mainly for leisure purposes, and the Inland
Waterways Association was formed to promote their rescue.
Today most commercial traffic is restricted to just a
few navigations, the rest of the system is awash with
private pleasure boats, hire cruisers, hotel boats and day trip
boats.
There are now reckoned to be more boats using the canals of
Britain today than ever during its commercial heyday. | 
