Britain thrives on its backwaters

Feb 12 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

One of Britain’s best known social historians tells Peter Elson why we must never forget the debt we owe the canal age

THE canal age which changed our landscape forever was the dramatic story of man against nature in a manner that is quintessentially British.

This is the belief of social historian and Antiques Roadshow expert Paul Atterbury, who has written extensively on canals and how they powered the world’s first industrial revolution.

Next week, he will give a public lecture on the subject at the National Waterways Museum, at Ellesmere Port, a town created as the terminus of the Shropshire Union Canal.

Having walked or boated along most of Britain’s 2,000 miles of canals, he is the perfect guide to discuss the making of the canal age and its great legacy.

“Even when canals have disappeared, you can still see them in the landscape. It’s man against nature in a particularly British way as they changed the landscape in a soft and discreet way,” he says.

“I’ve been involved in canals since the late 1960s, when I began to write guide books about them. I’ve always been a canal enthu-siast as it’s our industrial heritage which fascinates me.

“To understand the subject, you have to get into the landscape and the impact upon it of the canal age. The fact that you can see so much still there is remarkable.

“We’re still enjoying a predominantly 18th-century network and it’s astonishing we can still use it. This is not a great wrapped-up heritage package.”

The last 20 years has seen massive canal restoration for leisure use. Mid-Wales canals have returned, and again there are three trans-Pennine routes, rather than just the Leeds & Liverpool Canal (itself having a £17m extension across Liverpool Pier Head to Albert Dock).

Paul was born in London and brought up in the largely canal-free county of Kent. He now lives with his wife, Chrissie, in Dorset, the only county in Britain that doesn’t have a single inch of canal.

One of his other great interests is commemorated by his home, including a 1903 Great Western Railway coach which is now used as a holiday-let.

“When I was very young I developed a general interest in architecture, industrial archaeology and railways. They are all interwoven,” he says.

“So often, travelling around Britain, you are on a train running alongside a canal. Going north from London to Liverpool you ride parallel to the Grand Union Canal.”

This is inevitable as the surveyors were picking the best geographical routes and there are lots of examples when the engineers laid the railway lines on the beds of abandoned canals. “Obviously the scale is different to the motorway system as it was a small network, but it was still about making great cuttings, building viaducts and carving its way through hills.

“When sailing on a boat through a long tunnel, I think how every shovel was removed by human hand and I am aghast at what it represents in terms of human endeavour.”

Likewise, he has enormous respect for the new breed of canal engineers, like Thomas Telford, William Jessop, John Rennie and James Brindley, who practically had to invent their craft to turn the promoters’ vision into reality.

“I’ve always had a particular admiration for Telford. But they’re all great men who surveyed canal routes on horseback, which I find very exciting,” says Paul.

“They were a fantastic generation of men given extraordinary tasks which they achieved in spite of the difficulties of the technology, landscape and shortage money.