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Stan Yorke,Trevor Yorke | 128 pages | 31 Dec 2003 | COUNTRYSIDE BOOKS | 9781853068256 | English | Berks, United Kingdom Canals of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

The canals of the United Kingdom are a major part of the network of inland waterways in the United Kingdom. They have a colourful historyfrom use for irrigation and transportthrough becoming the focus of the Industrial Revolutionto today's role of recreational boating. Despite a English Canals Explained of English Canals Explained, today the system in the United Kingdom is again in increasing use, with abandoned and derelict canals being reopened, and the construction of some new routes. Canals in and are maintained by navigation authorities. One purpose-built ship canal in the United Kingdom, the Ship Canalis incomparable to any other. Canals first saw use during the Roman occupation of the south of Great Britain and were used mainly for irrigation. The Romans also created several navigable canals, such as Foss Dyketo link rivers, enabling increased transport inland by water. The United Kingdom's navigable water network grew as the demand for industrial transport increased. The canals were key to the English Canals Explained of the : roads at the time were unsuitable for large volumes of traffic. A system of very large pack horse trains had developed, but few roads were suitable for wheeled vehicles able to transport large amounts of materials especially fragile manufactured goods such as pottery quickly. Canal boats were very much quicker, could carry large volumes, and were much safer for fragile items. Following the success of first the followed by the Bridgewater Canalother canals were constructed between industrial centres, cities and ports, English Canals Explained were soon transporting English Canals Explained materials particularly coal and lumber and manufactured goods. As the Industrial Revolution took hold in the end of the 18th and beginning of the English Canals Explained centuries, English Canals Explained technology allowed canals to be improved. English Canals Explained early canals contoured round hills and valleys, later ones went straighter. Locks took canals up and down hills, and they strode across valleys on taller and longer aqueducts and through hills in longer and deeper tunnels. As trains, and later road vehicles, became more advanced, they became cheaper than the narrow canal system, being faster, and able to carry much larger cargoes. Some narrow canals became unusable, filled with weeds, silt and rubbish, or were converted to railways. There was a late burst of wide-waterway building e. However, the last new canal before the end of the 20th century was the in Yorkshire now South Yorkshire in As English Canals Explained intensified, horse-drawn single were replaced by steam and later diesel powered boats towing an unpowered butty, and many of the boatmen's families abandoned their shore homes for a life afloat, to help with boat handling and to reduce accommodation costs — the birth of the legendary "boatman's cabin" with bright white lace, gleaming brass and gaily-painted metalware. Constant lowering of tolls meant that the carriage of some bulky, non-perishable, and non-vital goods by water was still feasible on some inland waterways English Canals Explained but the death knell for commercial carrying on the narrow canals was sounded in the winter of —63, when a long hard frost kept goods icebound on the canals for three months. A few of the remaining customers turned to road and rail haulage to ensure reliability of supply and never returned, though both rail and road had been severely disrupted by the frost and snow too. Other traffic gradually ceased with the change from coal to oil, the closure of canalside factories, and run-down of English Canals Explained heavy industry. Regular narrowboat traffics continued, such as lime juice from to Boxmoor until while aggregates were carried on the until The last major investment development of the inland waterways was the enlargement of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation in the early s to cope with barges of standard European dimensions that in the depression of the 80s never came. The scale of the futile hopes of those days can be appreciated by the occupants of a holiday narrowboat nearly lost in a built for the barges that were going to sail down the Rhineacross English Canals Explained North Sea aboard a ship, and up to Doncaster. Today there have been a number of successful initiatives to get more traffic on to the larger inland waterways, though even the does not convey cargo ships to the docks in , which have English Canals Explained little English Canals Explained than a 'water feature' English Canals Explained the apartments, offices and cultural institutions of 'Salford Quays' that have replaced the wharves and . In the latter half of the 20th century, while the use of canals for transporting goods was dying out, there was a rise in English Canals Explained in their history and potential use for leisure. A large amount of credit for this is usually given to L. Roltwhose book Narrow Boat about a journey made in the narrowboat Cressy was published in A key development was the foundation of the Inland Waterways Associationand the establishment of fledgling weekly boat-hire companies, following the example of such companies on the Norfolk Broadswhich had long been used for leisure boating. The authority responsible for the canals, the Boardencouraged this process from the late s English Canals Explained operating a fleet of holiday hire boats, initially converted from cut-down working boats. Holidaymakers began renting ' narrowboats ' and roaming the canals, visiting towns and villages they passed. Other people bought boats to use for weekend breaks and the occasional longer trip. The concept of a canal holiday became even more familiar when the large English Canals Explained that dealt with Broads holidays began to include canal boatyards in their brochures. Canal-based holidays became popular due to their relaxing nature, self-catering levels of cost, and variety of scenery available; from inner London to the Scottish Highlands. This growth in interest came just in time to give local canal societies the ammunition they needed to combat government proposals in the s to close commercially unviable canals, and to resist pressure from local authorities and newspapers to "fill in this eyesore" or even to "close the killer canal" when someone fell in one. It was not long before enthusiastic volunteers were repairing unnavigable but officially open canals and moving on to restore officially closed ones and demonstrating their English Canals Explained viability to the authorities. Local authorities began to see how a cleaned-up and well-used waterway was bringing visitors to other towns and waterside pubs — not just boaters, but people who just like being near water and watching boats see gongoozler. They began to clean up their own watersides, and to campaign for "their" canal to be restored. As a result of this growing revival of interest, for the first time in a century some new routes have been constructed the and the Canal Linkanother is under construction the Fens Waterways Link. Large projects such as the restoration of the Anderton Boat Liftor the building of the attracted development funding from the European Union and from the Millennium Fund. Canal aqueducts are structures that carry a canal across a valley, road, railway, or another canal. Dundas is built of stone in a classical style. is an iron trough on tall stone piers. Three Bridges, London is a clever arrangement allowing the routes of the Grand Junction Canal, a road, and a railway line to cross each English Canals Explained. Locks are the most common means of raising or lowering a boat from one water level to another. The distinguishing feature of a lock is a fixed chamber whose water-level can be changed. Where a large height difference has to be overcome, English Canals Explained are built close together in a flight such as at . Where the gradient is very steep, a set of staircase locks are sometimes used, like Bingley Five Rise Locks. At the other extreme stop locks have little or no change in level but were built to conserve water where one canal joined another. An interesting example is King's Norton Stop Lock which was built with guillotine gates. See also List of canal locks in the United Kingdom. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Main article: History of the British canal system. Further information: List of canals of the United Kingdom. Further information: List of canal aqueducts in the United Kingdom. Further information: List of canal tunnels in the United Kingdom. United Kingdom portal Transport portal. British Waterways. Retrieved 3 February Britain's biggest English Canals Explained, its size, construction methods and operations make it incomparable with any other inland waterway in the country. The Guardian. Retrieved 13 March British Canals An Illustrated history Fifth ed. Retrieved 7 February Navigable canals of the United Kingdom. Notes : 1 Contains canalised river. Canals which form part of this system are not listed here individually. Hidden categories: Use dmy dates from June All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from February Articles with unsourced statements from August Commons link is locally defined. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Canals in the United Kingdom. English Canals Explained – Countryside Books

For many tourists, authors, and daydreamers, Oxford, England is a fairy-tale world of spires and towers, medieval gentility and lofty knowledge. But as with all heritage sites, its identity is a mythology. Just beside a car in the center English Canals Explained town, the unceremoniously branches off from the . It meanders along the western edge of the city, often obscured by apartment complexes or leafy inclines. But not far from the headquarters of the Oxford University Press, the canal spills out into the Port Meadow, a flat expanse of open common ground spotted with grazing horses and meandering townsfolk. The Oxford Canal, stretching over 78 miles and 97 mooring sites from the Thames in the south to the Hawkesbury Junction near Coventry in the once industrial English midlands, is just one small part of a whole parallel British dimension. At least 34, licensed boats wend their way along these routes. Most of these are just land dwellers out for a temporary escape, but somewhere between 4, and 6, of the boats on the canals belong to permanent boat people, those 15, or so Britons who have chosen to live their lives entirely on the water, and English Canals Explained so doing separate themselves from much of what defines the economy and life of the average Brit. The boats and English Canals Explained denizens seem separate, noble, and idyllic. But that image whitewashes and exoticizes a diverse community. Some just love the water. And some are expressly seeking to abandon what they English Canals Explained is a modern world gone awry. Some live on narrowboats, built to navigate industrial freight down the tight canals. Some live on so-called dumb boats, engineless blocks bobbing at a mooring. Some English Canals Explained on wide-beamed houseboats, those floating offshore flats. And some live as continuous cruisers, tooling around, never stopping for more than a couple of weeks in one place. What binds them as a community are the shared trials of near-autonomy—dragging your own sewage up an icy shore to a do-it-yourself disposal site, hauling your own water—and the same sense of greater or lesser dissociation from the mainland. They also share a mutual threat to life on the canals. Many will soon realize that the hidden costs of water life add up, or they will fail to integrate into the community, and eventually wash out. But in the meantime, many of them block up canals, bend the rules of the rivers, and bring more scrutiny to the waterways. The question becomes: will the culture of the boat people be crowded out or consumed? The earliest populations of boat people in England probably date back to the early Industrial Revolution, English Canals Explained the canals were initially built to transport raw materials and manufactured goods to factories and ports. The Oxford Canal, amongst the oldest, was inaugurated inand then opened in stages from English Canals Explainedcarrying coal and limestone about the countryside on a path that followed the contours of the land. But the heyday of the canals was short-lived, as by the midth century railways sprung up parallel to the canals, then began buying the waterways to control and snuff out their transit competition. As the industrial potential of the canals declined, though, people who had grown up around the water started to envision a new life for the canals. In the late s, T. Rolt, a renowned industrial historian and biographer, purchased an old boat called English Canals Explained Cressy and retrofitted it to liveable standards, then began taking months-long cruises along the waterways. English Canals Explained Wildman, the Chairman of the Residential Boat Owners Association, became a part of the boating community in the s, during this revival. He sees a good degree of continuity in the type of people on the water and the nature of the community from his English Canals Explained onwards. Perhaps the presence of marginalized peoples living somewhat unorthodox lifestyles helped to spread an initially dim view of boat people across the country, especially in smaller towns with less river traffic. This ill repute has persisted in some districts even as boating has gentrified. On the financial side, cautions Wildman, one must keep in mind the cost of a permanent mooring, few of which are available in overpriced and congested London one of the main sites of the economic land-to-water flight. The utilities do not come easily, either. Pumping in water supplies, offloading toilet waste, and finding and hooking up to electrical stations can be quite onerous tasks that few think of when looking into boat life. The average 7 foot by 50 foot narrow boat amounts to square feet of space for bedroom, kitchen, living area, toilet, and a cockpit, often shared by more than one person. And these rail-thin boats tend to be English Canals Explained more spacious models. The English Canals Explained of canal and 42 miles of the Thames that run through London have at least a few thousand residents at the moment, although the numbers are hard to English Canals Explained as many canals and moorings bend the rules, fitting in more people than laws permit. At the worst, this can lead to slum boat conditions with 20 or more people sharing just a few shacks. Some boaters, economically minded or not, also push the rules in an attempt to escape steep mooring charges, especially in places like London, by taking up continuous cruising licenses. This type of boater is obligated to move forward on a set course from place to place, staying in one location for no more than a few days. Most towns along canals have one to two day free moorings, and almost anywhere along a , boats can tie up for at least 14 days. But rather than move directly forward, some cruisers just move back and forth along a canal from free mooring to free English Canals Explained, or move in tiny increments. Many of those clogging up the canals right now will eventually wash out when they realize that life on the water is neither all cheeseboards and wine in the sun, nor that cheap and affordable. A new era is coming, regardless. Perhaps it will come from new attitudes from canal authorities and local councils, inspired by the recent boating spike. But more likely the changes will come about because the boating population is aging. According to Symonds, at least two-thirds of boat people are aged 55 and over, and most young English Canals Explained only come onto the water as holidaymakers, rather than permanent residents. The absence of young Britons is either due to the expense of buying a suitable craft, or the result of a cultural shift away from the community and ideals Wildman describes. If not, then these may be the dying days of this authentic remnant of industrial era history. Join our newsletter to get exclusives on where our correspondents travel, what they eat, where they stay. Free to sign up. If you want to get close to regular North Koreans, forget Pyongyang. Jul 08 Author: Mark Hay. A popular mooring Near Oxford flooded. English Canals Explained by: Mark Hay. A solar-powered narrowboat. Narrowboat by Thatcham station in the . Jericho Canal flowing through Oxford. Interior of the Audrey Too narroboat. The average 7 foot by 50 foot narrowboat amounts to square feet. At English Canals Explained Canal. Some boat owners move back English Canals Explained forth along a canal, using free moorings. Narrowboats moored in , . Featured City Guides. More Guides. The Boat People of Britain

In the history of canals, Britain was not a pioneer. The Chinese can claim that the Grand Canal of China was one of the first, in the tenth century, although even earlier examples existed in that country. The earliest canals were connected with natural rivers, either as short extensions or improvements to them. The difference between a natural river, and a wholly man-made canal is clear, but in between are many variations of river improvement and extension so it is therefore difficult to be precise about English Canals Explained navigation can claim to be the first canal! The familiar pound lock which is in use today in Britain is said English Canals Explained have been invented by Chhiao Wei-Yo, in the yearin China, although the mitre gate, an important part of the canal lock today, is credited to Leonardo Da Vinci. A notable waterway completed in was the Exeter Canal which bypassed part of a river to make navigation easier. This had the first pound locks in Britain, equipped with lifting, vertical gates. The mitre gate, which has V shaped gates held together by the water pressure, was introduced in this country on the River Lee, at English Canals Explained Abbey. Some other English Canals Explained British canals are an improved section of the River Welland in Lincolnshire, built inand the , in Gloucestershire, built English Canals Explained and the Sankey Canal English Canals Explained , opened in stages, - The great age of canal building started with the construction of the . This pioneering waterway is nowhere near the town of Bridgwater but was the initiative of the third Duke of English Canals Explained, pictured left image coutesy of The National Trust. A well educated young man, the Duke had visited a great early French navigation, the , miles long, which had been completed in The Duke owned coal mines at , north west of Manchester, a big city with an appetite for coal. The Duke made plans together with , one of his estate managers, and they brought in the engineer - who had previously built a reputation working on mills, water wheels etc. The enabling Act was passed in and English Canals Explained were further Acts of Parliament to amend and extend the scheme. Completed in the Bridgewater Canal was the catalyst that started half a century of canal building. Brindley had built an aqueduct which was regarded as a remarkable achievement, and there were tunnels right into the mines at Worsley where the coal was loaded. The price of coal in Manchester fell as the new means of transport made cheap deliveries possible. Next there followed a number of long distance navigations, with Brindley as the leading canal engineer of his time. He largely built the so-called "Grand Cross" of canals which linked the four great river basins of Britain, the Severn, Mersey, Humber, English Canals Explained the Thames, the latter being reached from via the Oxford Canal, lengthy route to London from the north. There were two concentrated periods of canal building, from to the early 's and from to almost the end of the eighteenth century. The American War of Independence separated the two periods. London and the south east did not feature much in the first period. Canals were built to serve the heavy industry of the north and midlands and whilst London had industry and the country's major port, it did not have coal mines and the surrounding south was mainly agricultural. London was not joined directly to the national canal network until with the opening English Canals Explained the Paddington Arm of the Grand Junction Canal. More detailed than the above summary.