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Lowering the profile of the waterways Anyone reading the
title might be forgiven for wondering if this is going to be about dredging.
After all, doesn't dredging mean just that - physically lowering the underwater
profile of the channel?
Well, yes it does - but in this case it's not the physical
profile of the waterways I'm discussing, it's their 'political' profile: the
canal-awareness of the powers-that-be, the media and the general population.
Because recently that profile has been climbing rapidly (some say it's been
climbing even faster than the mooring fees on the towpath-side in
Huddersfield!) and many of us are wondering if the profile has risen too high,
and needs lowering a bit... Let me give a few illustrations of how the profile
of the canals has risen.
Firstly with the 'powers-that-be'...
I remember when BW involvement in a waterway under
restoration was a major disadvantage. Not any more. Over the past five decades
the authorities have moved on from trying to abandon canals to trying to
prevent restoration, then to putting bureaucratic objections in the way of
restoration progress, then to letting us restore them but claiming credit for
it afterwards, and finally to forming partnerships with canal societies to push
the next generation of restoration projects forward. Having spearheaded canal
restoration for half a century the IWA are now having to work hard to keep up
with the pace. Where will it go next?
"Hello, is that Mike Palmer? It's Tony Blair here. I've
had the BW chairman George Greener on the phone, pestering me to restore the
Tameside Bolton and Ashton Canal, but we just can't find the money at the
moment. Your volunteers couldn't possibly do it, could they?" "
Awfully
sorry Tony - we're so busy with all these new projects that The Waterways Trust
keep coming up with that we simply can't spare enough volunteers to take on any
more new work right now. Have you tried KESCRG yet?"
"Afraid the Foreign
Office have already nabbed them to help with the Royal Military Canal -
apparently they're a bit worried about what the French are up to at the moment.
Are you sure you can't help us? You must one or two people in the Manchester
area with a bit of time to spare - it might be worth a few MBEs to prominent
local WRGies..."
"All right - we'll see what we can do..."
And secondly with the media...
When a canal appeared on TV it used to be because a soap
opera character needed to be written out of the series, and as 'Dirty Den' in
EastEnders found to his cost, the local waterway was a convenient place for
unwanted characters to be found deceased. If they tried that again now, the
victim and his pursuers wouldn't be able get near the canal for TV crews making
documentaries about wonderful people who live on the canals of East London.
And while in the 1960s local papers screamed 'Fill in
this killer canal' (and they were talking about local children drowning,
not soap opera villains), these days every week some local rag carries a
front-page story about how wonderful it is that somebody's clearing out the
local cut. In fact it's usually exactly the same front-page story, but that's
local papers for you...
And finally the general public...
A canal alongside a housing development used to be something
to be kept secret - for example by building high fences and making the houses
face away from the canal - for fear of putting people off living there. Now
it's the opposite: the mere mention of 'water', 'wharf', 'quay' or 'canal' in a
street name adds 20 per cent to the house prices. (Apparently the reason
Eurostar chose to send its Channel Tunnel trains to Waterloo rather than
another London terminus is because they thought that having 'water' in the name
meant they could add 20% to the train fares!)
Indeed it is rumoured that half way through restoration of
Over Basin on the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal, the houses being
built alongside were deliberately turned round so as to face the canal.
Alternatively it may simply be that the plans for the basin were changed so
frequently that the housing developer had to keep turning his houses around to
keep up with them.
You might think all this interest is good for the canals.
Well you'd be wrong. More interest means more boats - and there isn't room for
them. Already there are mooring shortages and queues for locks at busy times.
Think how many more people will be attracted to the canals by the current
levels of publicity. Where are they all going to go?
And what about those of us who took to the canals for their
tranquillity? Where's the tranquillity now, when you can't get near the
waterside for government spokesmen being interviewed by TV crews for news
broadcasts? No, the time has come for an exercise in putting people off using
waterways, before things go any further. And I'm glad to say that matters are
well in hand, and as usual these days BW are taking the lead...
Firstly by the well-tried method of making boating more
expensive. Higher licence and mooring fees and more stringent BSS requirements
are already reducing the impact of the new arrivals by pricing many older and
poorer boaters off the cut. And the current consultation about proposed changes
to boat licensing shows that they are serious about finding the best way of
achieving this objective.
Secondly, making the canals harder and more inconvenient to
use. This is easily achieved on canals under restoration, where a simple change
to the plans during restoration can ensure that an expensive and low-capacity
book-ahead feature such as an inclined plane or a tunnel-tug can be added to
the design, and thereby deter boaters. Making the canals difficult to use -
such as by inadequate dredging, stiff paddle gear, inadequate water supplies or
locks rebuilt to sub-standard dimensions - will put off a few more. And you can
always blame them on whoever restored that section of the canal, long before
you were involved. Then just trust the usual 'towpath telegraph' to exaggerate
the difficulties, and you needn't worry about these restored canals ever
getting overcrowded!
Thirdly by making the canals less fun to boat on. Already we
have thousands of signs telling boaters what they can and can't do; we also
have the proposed 'no drinking and boating' rules, more mooring restrictions...
soon the canals will be about as much fun to spend your holidays on as the M25.
Finally, there's the simple expedient of imposing a maximum
limit on boat movements permitted per year, and blaming the nature
conservationists for it. But there's more to come.
Secret plans leaked to me reveal a whole range of proposals,
aimed at slowing down the current enthusiasm for canals...
Congestion charging: London mayor Ken Livingstone's
plans for charging people to use the capital's overcrowded roads have achieved
widespread publicity, but not many people know that this is actually a pilot
scheme for a similar plan for the waterways. Busy areas such as the Oxford and
Llangollen will form similar 'congestion charging areas' and each time a boat
adds to their over-use it will automatically have £5 added to its annual
licence.
Pollution control: not the usual sort, but the
opposite. Canals are nothing like as smelly as they used to be: by encouraging
factories that produce unpleasant effluent to be built next to waterways, not
only will there be a return of the smells, strange coloured water and piled-up
detergent foam that once characterised the canals, but there will be so much
less canalside land available for expensive houses. And if anyone queries the
reason for the location of the factories, the 'regeneration' and 'job creation'
arguments should provide an adequate smokescreen. (as will the factories'
chimneys.)
More bureaucracy: most boaters hate officious and
pointless regulations, so a simple way to reduce waterways' popularity is to
impose more such rules. Recently the Port of London Authority have ruled that
if your friend offers you a ride on his boat on the Thames tideway and you give
him or her any advice, that makes you an 'unofficial pilot'. So you immediately
have to radio the PLA and tell them, otherwise you're breaking the law. This
scheme is to be extended to all waterways, so that before you can say "Keep
right on this bend, it's a bit shallow on the left" or "I reckon the
'Navigation Inn' is much better than the 'Old Boat' these days", you'll
have to call Watford by marine band VHF or face the consequences. And the
request from BW a year or so ago for volunteers to keep a log of wherever they
boated was a fore-runner of a plan to require all boaters to do this; the
boat-counters and lock-fill-meters installed around the system will be used to
check the accuracy of these logs, and any errors will be dealt with severely.
And finally... right at the beginning I mentioned
dredging, and it might just be that 'lowering the profile' physically might
just help to lower the profile politically too. By enlarging the channels to a
decent depth and width, they would of course be able to take much larger craft.
And with our roads and railways getting increasingly congested, that might even
mean the canals could carry some commercial traffic again. And what would be
more likely to deter pleasure boaters, builders of prestigious waterside
dwellings, TV crews making documentaries about house-boaters etc etc than a
constant succession of noisy smelly loaded barges churning along the canal with
their unglamorous cargoes of aggregates, coal, oil and steel? And as for
deterring the politicians? Well, you didn't really think all that rubbish from
them about wanting to see more freight back on the waterways was serious, did
you? |
