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This canal crosses a stream, shown in the left of the photograph. England's Neglected Waterways. By KEITH QUINTON. It is saddening to examine the present woeful aspect of England's system of canals. On the map they seem so perfect a network of communication over districts where one would think them necessary that we are cruelly shocked when we look into their unfortunate condition. Most of them are scandalously neglected. Our waterways are still beautiful, but their beauty is that of decay, not the brightness of successful use. Theirs is but the loveliness of silent waters, where thick weeds wander over surfaces stirred only by the wind. The trees hang low over the water, showing that no barges pass. The gates of their locks are rusted in their bearings; and their bridges are threaded by no boats. They are beautiful, but that is all, with the luxuriant, lazy beauty of a shady, disused pond. They would be more alive, and no less picturesque, if they were crowded with laden barges. They were not designed by landscape-gardeners who desired to beautify the scenery, but by men who wished to make them useful. They have been allowed to fall into disuse for many years, but now, at last, the numbers of those who realise their wasted possibilities are daily increasing, so that it is not unlikely that soon we may witness, and perhaps assist in, a startling change in their conduct. Even now there is a little traffic on many of the canals, and, to lighten the prevalent gloom of my picture, let me hastily and joyfully admit that there are others between important centres that are still busied with coal and stone, and other of the raw materials for whose transit they are so excellently fitted. Still, on how many is it unfortunately possible to walk on and on during a summer's afternoon, and never meet a barge, and perhaps see no one at all besides the few small boys who lie flat on their stomachs under a bridge, and beguile the fat roach and bream out of the lazy water. Along such a canal I have tramped for a whole day, meeting no one. It was clear that the towpath was traversed by very few, for the birds were as wild and free as if in the heart of the hill country; and when a huge swan flapped straight towards me in a long low line over the water, his wings screaming in their strong waving through the air, he seemed surprised, as lie swerved suddenly from me to the canal, that one of those strange, two-legged, loose-skinned animals should have had the impudence to penetrate into his fastnesses. That is it: we must think of many of our canals as no longer ours, but as the dominion of the wild swan and the water-hen; of their towpaths as the prowling-ground of the grass-snake and the rat; of their margins as the haunts of the frogs. It is interesting to discover the wherefore of this unhappy state of things. We want to know how the canals came to be neglected, and who are the people who oppose any movement towards their reorganisation. Of course, there are plenty of frivolous objections, like those of the naturalists, who say that we have nothing to grumble at, and that in the interests of natural history alone we should wish to keep these hunting-grounds for the beasts that are not common amongst us. Snakes, they say, are almost rare, and it would be a pity to drive them from the few places where two or three may still be seen in an hour's walk.
Where Regent’s Canal joins with the River Thames. Again, there are the painters who find the decayed canals so beautiful, and are frightened lest, with increased business, they should lose their picturesqueness. But these trivialities will have no weight with those who realise that in a good canal system is at least some small aid to the transport of goods; that is to say, something that makes life a little easier, and so a little happier, and so a little healthier than it is at present. The life of man is of far more importance to him than the existence of menageries of grass-snakes and stately swans; and, as I pointed out, as I saw for myself in a delightful tour along the Grand Junction Canal, barges in no way make canals ugly, but rather render them more beautiful. Our modern painters realise, just as clearly as all the people who read this article, that nothing is made ugly because it works, unless it was also ugly when it was idle. Who, then, will object'? Who will think himself at all reasonably justified in wishing to keep the canals among the unemployed? With much sympathy for their position, as well as with a strong conviction of its fundamental error, I must answer: The railway owners. To be fair we must consider the matter from their point of view, and, unless we can be persuaded that if we held shares in railways we should still wish to encourage the use of canals, we have not the thinnest, weakest, little ghost of a right to lay blame upon them. Imagine yourself a shareholder in a railway company. At first sight, you would naturally wish the country to send all its goods by rail. Regarding canals as rivals in your own way of business, you would wish them crippled or out of the way.
The Junction of the Northampton Arm. But here lies the point of the whole question, in the suggestion that canals and railways are two of a trade. That is exactly what they are not. It is impossible for water transit to vie in speed with railway work. That is to say, that canals cannot hope to carry goods that are in a vast hurry, and so to compete with the railways in carrying perishable goods. But where commodities are not perishable and a very high rate of speed not commercially important, the cost of sending them by water is less than the cost of sending them by rail. So that canals and railways are really only rivals in the carrying of heavy, imperishable goods. Perhaps we might think that here alone was sufficient cause for the railway hatred of the waterways, but there are advantages that the railways would gain from good canals that outweigh this small loss, and must now be carefully considered.
A pretty spot – Northampton Canal Junction. Canals help the railways by bringing them work from the country districts that they have not reached; and the gain that might be reaped in this way from an efficient canal system would counterbalance, and more than counterbalance, the imaginary gain that is theirs from their short-sighted policy of keeping the canals in disuse. This same fact - that canals connect country factories with the railway centres is tremendously important, not only from the point of view of the shareholders, but from that of all those-and their numbers are growing-who care for the ideal of a thoroughly healthy England. We want our towns to be markets only, and not congested factories. It may be safely said that the more numerous and the smaller are our individual factories, the healthier are we, and, with efficient connections, the more successful are our manufacturers, and so our working men. The manufacturer gains in the cheapness of his rent and the greater health, and so greater output in energy, of his workmen. All those who have seen the advantages of what some people delight in grandiloquently calling the "decentralisation of industry" point out how much healthier is the country artisan than the man who is mewed up in unhealthy buildings in a town's back streets, sent daily to work in a town factory that is cramped for want of land, and sent back again to sleep in the foul warren, one tiny space of which he calls his own.
The canal runs occasionally through quiet sylvan glades. Living is cheap in the country, and so consequently is labour. Those who see furthest ahead, and care most for the future of this bustling little England, wish to see no more of these hideous manufacturing towns, whose chimneys, spouting smoke out of the fog, are like the nostrils of the foulest of legendary vampires. They want no more of these terrible places, big workhouses as they are, where the only care is just to keep alive and work, keep alive and work, with the knowledge that when one dies one's place at the engine or the loom will be instantly filled by another unfortunate ready to live out the same unnatural, unhealthy life that has killed his predecessors. No. The England of the future is to have no manufacturing centres, but only trading and railway centres, where the goods from the country factories can be bought and sold, or sent away. We have seen what that will mean to the manufacturer. Let us see what it will do for the worker. He will no longer live in the town, but in the country, where there is plenty of room, and so no need to pile cottages one on the top of the other until they are turned into an ugly mass of so-called comfortable, but villainously unhealthy lodging - houses. He will have a comfortable home and fresh air - all the essentials of a healthy life. Nor is this utopia impossible in the realisation. It is a perfectly practical ideal, that is already on its way to realisation in the construction of such small working centres as Rugby, and in the migration of more than a few firms from their cities to the surrounding country. It is an ideal whose practicability will be quickly shown by an efficient canal system, making it easy for country manufacturers to send their goods to the railways. Why is our canal system inefficient at present? Partly because of enforced disuse. All that is left unused atrophies and decays away; and it is because so many of our canals are left so carelessly to the fishes and the swans that they have become choked with weeds and mud, necessitating much labour to restore them to fitness for practical purposes. Partly also because white men are always in a hurry.
The locks at Rickmansworth Junction.
The entrance to Regent’s Canal from the Docks at Limehouse. Horse haulage, except for a very few classes of goods, is most exasperatingly slow. It is a ghastly fact that it is easy to walk quicker along the towpath than most barges dawdle through the water. Few manufacturers rejoice at the idea of the thought of their merchandise passing to the place where they are to be changed for money at a pace no faster than that of a nursemaid with a perambulator. Again, the immense number of locks, an insignificant cause of delay when compared with the slowness of the poor old horse urged lazily along by the intermittent yells of a boy, are very serious obstacles to the establishment of any faster mode of progression. As soon as we have made up our minds that a satisfactory canal system would be of real advantage to the nation, and no disadvantage to that minority who hold shares in our railway companies, we shall find no insoluble difficulties in the organisation of the canals themselves.
No sooner out of one lock than into another. The first step will be a series of old-age pensions for the skinny old horses who have so patiently plodded and dreamed along the muddy towpaths. They will be allowed to rest for the short remainder of their lives. We shall substitute some kind of mechanical haulage. We are in too much of a hurry, as I pointed out in my last paragraph, to wait for lazy Nature. We must organise Nature for ourselves into steam tugs or electric motors, and so get along a little faster. Lastly, to make the swift transit of barges possible we must make some radical change in our present system of locks. Let us glance at what is being done here before considering the question of increased speed. With electrically worked locks, such as are already in use on some foreign canals, we may hope to see an improvement. And in the new barge lifts we see a still deeper movement to abolish locks and their disadvantages together. I remember at Foxton, at a junction of the Grand Junction Canal, there used to be a steep series of ten locks, close one above the other, connecting the two levels. They are used no longer. Instead, a huge inclined lift has been built on the side of the hill. Barges are carried up and down in mighty boxes, so that they float in water all the time. This vast machine is worked by steam and hydraulic power, and, ridiculous as it seems to those who have seen the monstrous lifts passing with their barges up and down the hillside, less than half a dozen men are required to superintend it.
An extraordinary optical delusion. In the question of speed we must follow the canal-owners of the Continent, who, realising its gigantic importance, are always experimenting in technical improvements. They have shown in actual practice that, even on a narrow canal, electricity quadruples the speed of the barges that once loitered behind a dawdling horse. There is no reason why, on our English canals, trains of barges should not be pulled by specially designed electric motors moving on rails on the towpath. Or we might use steam. We can let a wire rope lie along the bottom of the canal, and wind it over a steam-driven drum in the leading barge of a train, which so drags itself and its followers, hand over hand as it were, along the wire. This plan has been tried, but it is not likely to be ever very successful in cases where the canal takes sharp corners, winding about like a stream in the way so many of them do.
At the junction of the Slough Canal. The other plan before us suggests the use of steam tugs of low draught, and seems to promise success in large canals, though, the size of the screw being; necessarily limited, it is almost useless for narrow ones. On the whole, we are led to believe - or, at least most of us are led believe, myself, and I hope my readers, being among the number of the faithful - that the canals of the future will be run by electricity. Trains of light barges in small canals, or single monsters in big ones, will be drawn by electric haulage from the banks. The electricity that drives the hauling motors will also be supplied to the docks at either end of the journey, where cranes, lifts, and all loading and unloading machinery will be electrically worked at a speed unimaginable by those human machines who at present do their work, well lubricated with beer, as slowly as is compatible with the appearance of business. But there are those who cry out against hurry, and call upon us to take breath. They forget that the object of the work is rest, and that the quicker we work the longer we have for play, and thought, and a hundred other things. This fact is the only excuse that is needed by all the machinery that has ever been invented. It is the excuse of every time-saving notion that has ever been brought to perfection. The consciousness of its truth urged men to make railroads and tramlines, and the same consciousness will urge them to remake their canals that they half forgot in the excitement of speed's new gifts from steam and electricity. Yet is sad to turn aside from hopes for the future to look at the signs of the present, and see a canal with noble possibilities, like the Basingstoke, offered for sale as much for its fishing and boating as for any of its real advantages. All the same, the reorganisation of our canals will take time; and there is no reason why they should not be used meanwhile in the most delightful manner. My tour in a beautiful Napier motorboat along the Grand Junction Canal convinced me that a more enjoyable holiday could scarcely be imagined than a summer's boating trip along our sunny inland waters. There is a winsome beauty (I know no other word that so fitly expresses what I mean) in these high banks of shrub and grass and bramble, rising on either side of smooth clear water, framing, in the best of frames, whole galleries of shimmering reflections.
The second lock on the grimy Regent’s Canal. We have our canals. Let us use them as we may. If we cannot just now make successful use of them in business, that is no reason why they should be as unknown to us as if they were non-existent. They offer fishing and boating, and what is to my mind almost more enjoyable than either, I mean a towpath tramp. Article from : London Magazine (A Magazine of Human Interest) Summer 1905
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