Jasper Winn - Water Ways

A thousand miles along Britains canals

JASPER WINN

Jasper Winn grew up in West Cork, where he left school age ten and educated himself by reading, riding horses and playing music, an upbringing that shaped a lifetime of travel. He is the author of Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland (Sort Of Books), the story of a solo trip by kayak, and is currently Writer in Residence for the Canal and River Trust.

To my mother for her optimism, humour, love and eclectic library of books

A thousand miles along Britains canals

JASPER WINN

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Profile Books:

3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Jasper Winn 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

e-ISBN 9781782833345

Preface The Narrowboat Pub
R EGENT S C ANAL

Chapter 1 Have you ever been on a boat before?
O XFORD C ANAL

Chapter 2 Locks Ancient and Modern
E XETER C ANAL

Chapter 3 The Coal Duke Dunce and the Home-School Engineer
B RIDGEWATER C ANAL

Chapter 4 In Praise of Navvies
H UDDERSFIELD N ARROW C ANAL

Chapter 5 Horse Power
S TOUR R IVER AND G RAND W ESTERN C ANAL

Chapter 6 Rise and Fall
L LANGOLLEN AND N ORTHWEST C ANALS

Chapter 7 Canal Folk
S HROPSHIRE U NION C ANAL

Chapter 8 Jules Fuels
G RAND U NION C ANAL

Chapter 9 Endurance
K ENNET AND A VON C ANAL

Chapter 10 War and Salvage
R OYAL M ILITARY AND S TRATFORD-UPON -A VON C ANALS

Chapter 11 Force Leisure
D UDLEY , W ALSALL AND G RAND U NION C ANALS

Chapter 12 Coast to Coast
L EEDS AND L IVERPOOL C ANAL AND A IRE & C ALDER

Chapter 13 Live-Aboards
R EGENT S C ANAL , R IVER L EA AND M ACCLESFIELD C ANAL

Chapter 14 Carry On Up the Canal
S TRATFORD-UPON -A VON C ANAL

The Narrowboat Pub

REGENTS CANAL

SUNLIGHT REFLECTED off the Regents Park Canal as I made my way to the Narrowboat pub to meet a man called Ed. We were meeting to discuss a job well, a job of a kind. Ed worked for the Canal & River Trust and they had an idea they might appoint a writer-in-residence. Someone prepared to spend the next year or two travelling the length of Britains canal network, getting a sense of life on the modern waterways, and fashioning a book at the end of it. My name had been put forward by a publisher friend on the strength of having written a book called Paddle, about a kayak trip around Ireland. (Actually, not just any kayak trip around Ireland but possibly the slowest ever having chosen what turned out to be Irelands stormiest summer in living memory.) The only trouble, I reflected, walking along the towpath, was my complete inexperience of canals. Id never been on so much as a narrowboat holiday.

On the other hand, I knew how to travel slowly (canals operate at a horses walking pace), and over the years I had picked up odd bits of knowledge of canals. After all, most of us in Britain live within five miles of a stretch of canal, so they are hard to avoid. As a nineteen-year-old, Id paddled a heavy, yellow fibreglass kayak along the Kennet and Avon Canal across the southwest of England. Back then, restoration was still in progress and Id had to pull the kayak up the flight of twenty-nine locks at Caen Hill on a pair of pram wheels Id found in a skip. Then, a couple of decades later, Id walked the eighty miles of Irelands Grand Canal one of the earliest built in the British Isles from Dublin to Shannon Harbour. Why I chose to do that in the depths of a cold winter, with the waters iced over, I no longer entirely recall.

At other times Id followed lengths of rural canals in the Midlands to seek out kingfishers or spot Daubentons bats wheeling through the dusk. And once Id walked for a few days along a summer-warmed Oxford Canal, guitar on shoulder, as the happiest way to get to a gig in Banbury. On many an occasion, too, thered been canalside pubs, and escapes from London traffic by cycling along towpaths.

Perhaps boating wasnt the whole point of the waterways?

I reflected on all these claims as I followed the Regents Canal towpath past Camley Street Natural Park, and then over and around the Islington Tunnel. I felt a growing excitement at the prospect of spending time with canals as I passed intriguing remnants of boatmens wharfs and stopped to watch a pair of coots head-bobbing across the water. The boats moored along the bank with their wafts of chimney smoke from the salvaged pallets and foraged branches piled up on their roofs were invitingly the homes of steampunk eccentrics, some of them doggedly preserving the traditional livery of roses and castles painted panels. Then there was the bewitching cleverness of the locks at Kentish Town and again at St Pancras with their simple stone chambers and heavy gates, able to lift huge boats uphill with the soft power of water alone.

There was a thrill, too, at the realisation that these water roads and towpaths could carry me or anyone out of the city and into the countryside and on to the distant coastal ports of Liverpool, Hull or Bristol. Britains 2,000-odd miles of waterways can transport one through (and at times under) the Pennines, along river navigations and into mill towns, on to tiny villages or across corners of the countryside, even less busy now than they would have been in the canals nineteenth-century golden age.

I arrived at the Narrowboat in a flurry of enthusiasm and met Ed sitting on a balcony overhanging the canal, watching boats go by. We got our pints in and it began to snow, which felt magically odd on an April morning. We ordered venison sausages and mash suitably hearty fare for the weather and I listened as Ed told me how the canals had almost been lost in the 1940s, before being rescued and renovated by activists, enthusiasts, volunteers and government agencies. He had been at it himself for the past twenty years, first at British Waterways and latterly at the Canal & River Trust (CRT), the charity set up in 2012 to continue steering the canals journey from industrial carriers into a sustainable haven for boaters, walkers, cyclists and anglers, and as wildlife habitats and corridors.

Ed talked of wellness as a key aim of the charity, maintaining the canals as a resource that benefited the nations health both physical and psychological. He enthused even more about canal nature, about the growing populations of water voles, otters and kingfishers, and reeled off bird species that had found sanctuary in the linear wilderness. And there was art, too, he told me the Trust has commissioned site-specific works for the centenary of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, but wherever I went I would find canal-themed art and sculpture, plays and poetry.