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Many years ago, one Alan
Jervis - the then chairman of WRG - was interviewed in a waterways magazine:
"So Alan, what will you do when you run out of derelict canals to
restore?"
"We'll build some new ones!"
Who could have dreamed that an apparently flippant remark
would one day come true, and that the early 21st century would see
the opening of Britain's first two new waterways for nearly 100 years - the
Great Ouse Relief Channel, and the Ribble Link Navigation? Or that a more
ambitious project would be planned - the Bedford-Milton Keynes Link Waterway?
(Indeed, who would have dreamed when Alan Jervis was young that Milton Keynes
itself would ever be built? But I digress.)
All over the country, new navigations are gaining support.
The Ribble Link and Bedford-Milton Keynes Link look set to be followed by the
Leam Link near Leamington, the Rother Link in Yorkshire, and pretty much
anything else with 'Link' in it's name! ( rumour has it that a Waterways
World reporter was despatched to South London, convinced that at new
connection between a restored Croydon Canal and a restored Surrey Iron Railway
was on the cards - and was disappointed to find that 'Croydon Tramlink' was in
fact something rather different...)
And within a year, work will start on a new Liverpool Docks
Canal, connecting (sorry 'linking') the Leeds & Liverpool Canal to Albert
Dock. (Now there's a thought - connecting canals to docks. Good heavens, maybe
somebody will think of carrying goods on them next! No, crazy idea if you ask
me...)
But my spies in high places (such as the Falkirk Wheel!)
suggest that even more ambitious projects are on the horizon...
The Kennet & Avon has been restored, but would be more
useful if its western end could provide connections that avoided the tidal
passage around Avonmouth - and maybe even a link to the south coast rivers. So
a new waterway will connect Salisbury, Bath and Evesham - called the Avon, Avon
and Avon Canal.
Closing the major gap in the network between Scotland and
England is more important now that the Scottish lowland canals have been
restored. So a new canal will link the Yorkshire waterways, via the Lake
District to the Scottish southern uplands: the Esk, Esk and Esk Waterway will
connect Eskdale to Eskdalemuir, where it will connect to the Esk and Avon Canal
which will join the Scottish Avon, which will be canalised down to the Union
Canal at the Avon Aqueduct, where a short new link canal called the Avon
Navigation and Union Canal Union Canal will vie with the Aire & Calder
& Sheffield & South Yorkshire New Junction Canal for the title of
"Shortest Canal with the Longest Name".
These new waterways will in turn be connected to south east
England by a new waterway from York via Kings Lynn and Brandon to Lewes in
Sussex - called the Ouse, Great Ouse, Little Ouse and Ouse Link Navigation, and
where it passes though Lincolnshire you can be sure that some new Lincs Links
will be linkin' Lincoln to all parts...
And up in Manchester, a restored Manchester Bolton &
Bury Canal will be linked to a restored Manchester and Salford Junction Canal
by the new Manchester Bolton and Bury and Manchester and Salford Junction Link
Union Junction Canal Navigation.
Such a major expansion of the waterways system raises
several questions:
Firstly, how will the new waterways be financed?
Well, as it happens there is a current BW 'consultation' on
how boaters are to be charged for using the waterways, on the grounds that the
existing system has been in place so long that people are starting to
understand it. One of the questions in the ' consultation' asks whether "the
licence fee should be related to the length of waterways that my boat is able
to access". And as it seems not unreasonable at a first glance (at least
compared to some of the other options in the document), they hope everyone will
support it. Having got the boaters to agree to pay more if they can access more
canals, they then treble the size of the network, and - bingo - three times the
amount of licence money comes rolling in, and pays off all the money that has
had to be borrowed in the meantime to build the new canals!
Secondly, what dimensions will the new waterways be built
to?
Canals that are suitable for the narrow boat, the Dutch
barge, wide-beam short-boat, tub-boat etc. all have their supporters among the
owners of such craft. But the beauty of building new waterways is that if you
don't like th e dimensions that they've been built to (for example because
you've just been foolish enough to buy a boat that won't fit them) you can
simply go and build another new canal to your own favourite size: after all,
surely the people actually bui lding the canals get to choose how big they make
them? Eventually there will be so many new canals that everyone can have their
own personal waterway built to their own personal size. And the few eccentrics
who still love the old historic waterways with all their variations and
regional characteristics around the country, and were sensible enough to buy a
boat that will fit all of them, will be able to travel on all of the new
canals, and marvel at the way the idiosyncrasies of the past are being carried
on into the future.
Thirdly, will they feature 'high tech' modern engineering
marvels like the Falkirk Wheel?
Given that they're new canals rather than historic relics,
there's no reason why not. Indeed, there's every reason to incorporate as many
as possible of these fancy bits of engineering. For starters, just in case the
extra boat licence money is inadequate to pay for the new canals, they're much
more likely to attract funding from elsewhere if they have a flashy-looking
boat lift rather than a boring flight of locks. And once they're open, if
they're still short of cash... well, you simply impose the standard £35
toll for out-of-the-ordinary feature on a restored canal (such as boat lifts,
tunnel tugs or tidal locks ). And you can justify it on the grounds that it
costs money to employ a toll-clerk to collect the tolls... And to any
fuddy-duddies who think a flight of locks would be more sensible than a new
boat lift at Brogborough on the Bedford-Milton Keynes link - just you wait till
you see the plans for the Boston-Peterborough Canal: five inclined planes, a
water slope, a vertical lift, the world's first staircase-drop-lock and a two
mile tunnel with nuclear-powered tugs! And all on a canal that's runs through
dead-flat empty fenland countryside for its entire length.
As a spokesman for the Boston-Peterborough Link said when
questioned about the need for all these modern and innovative devices:
"20-mile dead-straight level canals like the South Forty Foot Drain or Old
Bedford River were 'modern and innovative' in their time. Indeed at Boston a
novel tidal-lock that was too short for most boats and therefore had to be
passed on the level was experimented with. All of the engineers of the time
were willing to make use of the very latest in methods, materials and ideas
e.g. building dead-straight level canals with no discernible features on them
at all and hardly any locks, to replace the old undrained fenland bogs. It is
this spectacular pushing of the boundaries that enthusiasts and the general
public seek out and celebrate now. We should not be timid if we are to
introduce a new generation to the canals, and to the joys of queuing overnight
to pay a keeper 35 quid to use an unnecessary boat lift."
And finally: where will it end?
You might worry about eventually running out of space to
build more new canals. Rest assured that this will not happen for a long time
yet. Take Venice, for example. Although it may have less miles of canal than
Birmingham, it's also a lot smaller: it crams the whole 37 kilometres of canals
(including 6.5km of derelict ones which I'm sure will one day be restored) into
an island covering only 7 square kilometres - and much of the south end has no
canals at all, so they're all crammed into about 5 square km. Rather than
re-open the debate about metrication on British canals (other than to point out
that the BW 'consultation' mentioned above also proposes that boats over 2.13
metres wide should pay more for their licences: as 2.13m equals about 6ft
11.9in, this means that 7 ft-wide ex-working narrow boats will have to pay more
than modern 6ft 10in boats for the privilege of not fitting through the
Huddersfield Canal) I'll convert these into miles: Venice has 23 miles of canal
in only 2 square miles of city. That's the same density as the whole BCN being
squeezed inside the Birmingham inner ring-road. Or all of London's canals being
crammed into Hyde Park. (which would make it a damn good site for the
'National', it has to be said!) At that density, Britain won't be full of
canals until there are ONE MILLION MILES of them! (and under the system
proposed above, a typical boat licence will cost £35000 a week.)
But digging a million miles of canal leads to a problem -
what do you do with all the spoil that you dig out? Simple! Dump it all in the
Atlantic - lo and behold, Atlantis rises from the deep! (Then you criss-cross
Atlantis with canals, and dump the spoil in the Pacific...)
And how do you transport all the spoil? Hmmm, maybe that
suggestion of using a canal to move goods to Liverpool Docks wasn't such a
crazy idea after all... |
