British Waterways

Debate between Tristram Hunt and Roger Williams

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Thank you for allowing this Adjournment debate, Mr Speaker, on the future of British Waterways. May I also thank the waterways Minister for his presence here tonight?

This topic might seem a rather limited one, of interest only to narrowboat enthusiasts, barge owners, dog walkers and lock-keepers, but it is of profound importance not only for canal-side communities in villages, market towns and cities across the country, but for the intellectual validity of this Government. For what we have before us tonight is a test case for the big society in action. That, in case you missed it, Mr Deputy Speaker, is the Conservatives’ big idea: a commitment to society, not the state, and to people power, not market dogma. My message to the Minister is very simple: we are here to help him. As he begins his grand battle with the Treasury on the future of British Waterways, I want him to know that he has my support against the plunderers and privatisers who work alongside him.

We are an inland nation as much as an island nation; a country shaped as much by our great rivers and historic canals as by our by encircling seas. Take, for instance, my own wonderful constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central. In Simeon Shaw’s 1829 classic, “History of the Staffordshire Potteries”, he writes of how

“in the vale below Burslem, July 26, l766, the first clod was cut of the Trent and Mersey Canal, by the late Josiah Wedgwood, Esq., then recently appointed Potter to the Queen Consort of George III.”

Wedgwood’s interest in canals was driven by profit rather than pleasure. He had already petitioned this place in 1763 for a new system of turnpike roads to allow for the easy carriage of the raw materials needed for his Etruria pottery works as well as the safe delivery of his finished ceramics, but still the road network let him down. So in 1765 he personally subscribed £1,000 for a new canal to connect the Trent with the Mersey and to allow his firm to export both nationally and internationally. The great engineer James Brindley was commissioned for the task and soon his entire network of canals criss-crossed the country, with Staffordshire as their box junction.

To allow for the transport of limestone and coal into Stoke-on-Trent, a new canal was added—the Caldon canal—that stretched from Etruria up into the surrounding moorlands. All that underpinned the boom days of the Potteries. “Pro patria populoque fluit”—it flows for country and people—was the Trent and Mersey’s motto, and the money certainly flowed for Wedgwood.

No wonder the great Adam Smith felt moved to praise canals for

“diminishing the expence of carriage”,

and putting

“the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town”.

As a vehicle for the investment of new provincial capital flows and for easing the transport of goods, canals were an essential feature of the first industrial revolution, but by the 1840s, the canal boom had given way to railway mania. Indeed, the consequence of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation meant that the canals and waterways of Britain were soon in danger of becoming open-air sewerage systems.

In 1847, the Scottish novelist Hugh Miller described the Irwell in Salford as

“a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except perhaps the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud-volcano.”

My old friend Friedrich Engels was equally disparaging about the state of Manchester’s Irk,

“a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream...out of whose depth bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and give forth a stench that is unbearable.”

Railways took over from the canals, canal companies went into liquidation or were run down by railway owners, and local authorities declined to pay for canal upkeep.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s general point about railways taking over from canals, but does he accept that because the Glanusk estate refused to have the dreaded railway across their land, the Mon and Brec canal persisted for a lot longer than most canals?

[Tristram Hunt]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I bow to his superior knowledge on the specificities of that point and I agree with it. However, there was a broad concern about the control railways had over canals in the late 19th century, which led to their being run down and to a collapse in infrastructure. Tonnage levels fell, canal miles collapsed and locks crumbled.

Eventually, the tide turned. The first stirrings of preservation can perhaps best be traced back to L. T. C. Rolt’s masterpiece, “Narrow Boat”, which described a journey taken in 1939 and expressed a terrible fear that

“if the canals are left to the mercies of economists and scientific planners, before many years are past the last of them will become a weedy, stagnant ditch, and the bright boats will rot at the wharves, to live only in old men’s”—

and we should add women’s—

“memories”.