HUMOUR

Waterway Restoration Funding

by "Reg at Rickmansworth"

But in the old days, that didn't really matter anyway: canal restoration 30 years ago was cheap by today's standards. After all, nobody needed millions of pounds for rebuilding road bridges or tunnels when the typical canal under restoration had only been derelict for ten or twenty years, British Waterways hadn't even bothered to abandon it, and the local authorities would promise to do all they could to eliminate the canal... short of actually spending a penny on filling it in.

No, all you needed to restore it was enthusiasm, chewing gum and string, and maybe a few old telegraph poles for balance beams or the odd stick of dynamite for clearing out the more serious blockages (and let's face it, when much of your labour was prisoners on day-release, supplies of cheap dynamite were usually fairly easy to come by.)

That's not to say that the volunteers had an easy time, though. But the battles were largely with mud and with officialdom - trying to persuade BW to deign to allow you to use your own time and effort to prevent a canal that they couldn't or wouldn't maintain from falling any more derelict - rather than with tight-fisted funding agencies and their nonsensical notions that there are any more worthwhile projects for them to support than your canal restoration scheme.

If you had told the canal restorers of the early 1970s that 30 years on, there would be grants of over 10 million pounds for canal restoration, they would have thought that you were completely mad. Or more likely they would have assumed that you were predicting that inflation would carry on at 1970s levels for the next 30 years, and that by the early 21st century 10 million would just about buy you a single trip through Anderton, or maybe a year's membership of IWA.

Back in those distant days, all you needed to fund your restoration work was a few shillings for a bag of chips and a pint of mild at lunchtime, 20 Woodbines and a bag of Uncle Joe's Mintballs to keep you all aglow as you worked.

Not any more. Canals are being restored that nobody would have dreamed possible in the 1970s. Restoration projects that would have been (and in some cases were) written off as impossible are now approaching completion, and the restorers are moving on and beginning work on more and more ambitious new schemes.

Nowadays nobody thinks twice about demolishing a supermarket or digging up a trunk-road to put a canal back. A canal that's been filled in, concreted over, built on, criss-crossed by new motorways, and any surviving bits contaminated with chemical waste and sold off to Town Centre Securities PLC is now seen as a good prospect for restoration. (After all, the more concrete and toxic substances there are on the line of the canal, the less chance of it attracting any rare flora or fauna, and therefore the lower the likelihood of it falling prey to the only real bar to restoration - the Nature Conservation lobby.)

But all this major rebuilding work costs money - more than the resources of the old-time canal restorers could possibly have run to: despite Gordon Brown's best efforts, a pint of mild and a packet of fags cost rather less than a new motorway bridge.

Not only that, but by some curious quirk of economics, the downturn in inflation that has seen prices rise relatively little since 1980 doesn't necessarily seem to have applied to canal restoration, whose costs continue to spiral upwards: the price of paddle gear is climbing as steeply as the Bingley Five-rise, and new lock gates are worth nearly as much as Bill Gates. Even lift-bridges are going up!

Add to that the way that the number of canal restorations is still increasing, with new schemes springing up overnight like so many BW signboards, and you can see why the money needed annually to sustain Britain's canal restoration effort is now greater than the Gross National Product of the world's 18 poorest countries, and it is rumoured that canal restoration will appear as a separate item in the next Budget.

But unlike the 1970s when all the Chancellor had to do if he ran out of cash was print some more, these days it's not so easy to keep up with the demand. So as the demands on their resources grow bigger, the restoration funding bodies' criteria are getting tighter - almost as tight as some of the locks on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. Regeneration grants have to go to suitably run-down areas; heritage money needs to be spent on genuinely historic restorations; regional funds have to be spent in tightly-defined geographical areas.

But it's not as if the money isn't available - every one of these funds has enough to pay for all the canal restoration work that it is ever likely to be asked for: it's just that the poor benighted souls in the funding agencies have somehow got it into their heads that there are other things to spend cash on besides canals. And however much we in the IWA try, we can't convince them otherwise: at best, they ignore us; at worst, they announce a moratorium on all canal grants while they conduct a study into whether they should be making more grants to canals, and two years later their study proves that they were doing everything right all along.

It is no good being confrontational with these people: if canal restoration is to continue to attract the financial support that it deserves, a new and more subtle approach is called for. Canal restorers are going to have to be more inventive and even a little 'economical with the truth' when it comes to fundraising.

I have a few modest suggestions of how this new subtle approach might work...

It the fund-holders are reluctant to commit more money to canals, why not pretend that your project isn't a canal at all? Just bid for a grant to reclaim some derelict land, and only mention in the smallest of small-print that there just happens to be a canal running across the land.

Several 'heritage' type funds tend towards the notion that building a new length of canal is not 'heritage' work at all, even though it seems to you that it has obvious heritage benefits in that it links two isolated restored sections of historic waterway into a viable stretch for reopening to the public. Don't argue with them - simply build a low-cost derelict canal (a small ad in 'Navvies' will probably identify a supply of suitable rotten lock-gates, broken bricks and rubbish for a modest sum) and then apply for a grant to restore it. And don't worry if you're project isn't a restoration at all, but a brand new waterway under construction: there were hundreds of canals that were proposed but never built - such as the Grand Union-Great Ouse link for example - so there's bound to be one near you. You can easily persuade the Heritage Lottery Fund that as you are restoring a canal that was planned in 1795 if you show them all the engineer's plans and the Act of Parliament: there's no need to mention that an Act of Parliament and some engineer's plans were as far as the canal ever got...

Apply for a grant as a Railway Preservation Society: don't bother to mention that you are actually restoring the canal that was filled-in before the railway was built.

Convince the Ministry of Defence that what you're building is of military importance. Back in the 1980s, the Higher Avon scheme ran into trouble when it planned to build a new lock on a piece of National Trust 'inalienable' land - given to the nation for all time. Cynics pointed out that the NT had recently sold a piece of similarly-protected 'inalienable' land to the MOD to build a nuclear fallout shelter and suggested that the MOD maybe had more clout than a canal society. They may have had a valid point, but that didn't get them their lock: surely the subtle approach would have been to design a nuclear fallout shelter 70ft long by 14ft wide with big wooden doors at each end. Then, come the next round of defence cutbacks, the end of the Cold War or whatever, it would have been ready and waiting...

(Actually this approach of creating non-canal structures that can easily be recycled into navigation works has already had some success: the designing of new fairground rides that can later be turned into boat-lifts, as in Scotland. And it is rumoured that the Millennium Dome was planned so that ultimately it could be turned upside-down and re-used as a canal basin for the Croydon Canal.)

It is notable that projects in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and ex-industrial areas of England such as the West Riding of Yorkshire have been more successful at attracting funding in recent years than those of the more affluent south of England - thanks mainly to 'regional' grants. So move your canal project to a suitable area for restoration, and bring it back when it's finished. Parts of the Anderton Lift and Falkirk Wheel have been built off-site - but why not go the whole way and (for example) move the entire Thames & Severn Canal to Rotherham for restoration, then ship it back south later? I keep seeing references in the magazines to 'canal transport'; presumably this is what is meant. (The alternative explanation - that the phrase 'canal transport' implies use of canal boats as a practical way of moving freight - just seems too far-fetched to be possible.)

Alternatively, next time the government are planning one of their periodical rounds of pointless boundary changes, see if you can infiltrate the appropriate department and get some extra items added: for example, the Wilts & Berks Canal already goes through Oxfordshire rather than Berkshire; why not go a little further and have it go through parts of Lanarkshire, Country Antrim and Dyfed? You might thing that this would make some of the UK's boundaries look a little odd, but it's really no worse than they already are - after all, Berwick isn't in Berwickshire, the county town of Surrey isn't in Surrey and County Durham sounds like it's somewhere in Ireland. Let's have Droitwich in the same Local Authority as Northwich and Middlewich, and the Isle of Dogs included under the Highlands & Islands development board.

If your canal is lacking in derelict ex-industrial land alongside it that might attract regeneration money, invent some canalside industries that never existed: line the banks with mock-ups of derelict pit-heads, excavate some 'old' quarries nearby or maybe build a few old abandoned lime-kilns.

Or just lie about it. Claim that your canal is in some area that qualifies for regional assistance from Europe when actually it runs though the most prosperous parts of England's booming 'Silicon Valley' country. Rename it to the 'Wilts & Berwicks', or the 'Thames & Shannon', or the 'Herefordshire and Glamorganshire' and see if anyone actually spots what you've done before the cash starts rolling in. Let's face it, the people in charge of the EU subsidies have seldom been outside of the bars of Brussels: they probably wouldn't know the Medway from the Meuse.

Look out for the next industries that are likely to fail, and get your restoration / construction plans ready. If you look around you next time you're with a bunch of WRGies relaxing in their accommodation after a day's hard work, you'll notice that the more astute canal restorers are scanning the columns of 'Investors weekly' rather than 'Waterways World' or 'Navvies'. They're checking to see whose factory is going to go bust next, so that the local canal scheme can be first in the queue for the money when a formerly-prosperous area suddenly becomes derelict ex-industrial land and qualifies for development aid.

And if there don't seem to be any signs of imminent collapse in the appropriate industry, you could always give it a gentle push: if it's in decline anyway, why not help it on its way a bit? I am not at liberty to divulge exactly how our moles in Railtrack helped to ease the company towards receivership, but just think: if the entire rail system ends up closing down, every railway track will be ex-industrial land qualifying for reclamation grants, and many of them will be eminently suitable for re-use as canals. And watch out JCB - if the canal volunteers ever stop using your products and start publicly extolling the virtues of your rivals such as Kubota or Caterpillar, that'll mean that they've decided that the time has come to reinstate the length of the Caldon Canal Uttoxeter Extension that is currently buried under the JCB factory in Rocester, and it would be a whole lot easier if it turned into 'derelict land'.

(By the way, there is no truth in the rumours that Foot & Mouth Disease was deliberately spread by canal restorers as a way of depressing the country economy and making canals more likely to be eligible for grants. Such scurrilous suggestions have no place in this worthy web site, and should be redirected to 'Navvies'.)

Finally, if all else fails, don't be afraid to take to a life of crime in support of the canals. Already I see mention in the canal magazines of 'bank protection' work: you might think this refers to physical reinforcement of the canal sides, and indeed that's what we would rather the public continued to believe - but between you and me, the 'protection' is the sort of thing that the Kray twins used to get involved in, and the 'bank' is likely to be Barclays or NatWest. And when they talk about 'match funding' they're probably talking about purchasing inflammables for an arson attack...

Naturally, such a course of action would carry an element of risk of arrest and possible imprisonment. But look on the bright side: while you're 'inside', you'll probably make all kinds of useful contacts that will help your restoration project once you're out again - such as explosives experts, extortionists, blackmailers, insider-dealers, Tory MPs and so on... and you never know - you might just end up on day release, working on a canal restoration project, just like those prisoners back in the 1970s!