Will we leave things in a better state than we found them?

NABO general secretary Peter Braybrook comments on some more topical issues.

I CAME to boating fairly late in life at 50 years old. I started boating in 1999 on a 67ft hire boat with a crew of eight which included four teens and twenties who made short shrift of dealing with lock flights. Outside of the City of

Birmingham the Black Country was anything but that. It was green, verdant and pleasant to cruise.

In the city, we saw need and some parts were, shall we say, in need of regeneration and development. Birmingham has been a city in flux for as long as I have known it. Sometimes termed the biggest building site in England, there have been tower cranes on the city skyline for decades. There is always a project going on. The principle is betterment, development, and making things better for future generations. Slums have been cleared, high-rise blocks have been replaced with more humanly scaled developments, industrial areas have been opened out to provide green spaces and new roads have been built to take the flow of traffic around the city centre.

The canal too has been transformed from an industrial transportation hub of basins and wharves to a tourist attraction in its own right. Beside it are restaurants and bars, meeting halls and music venues, pleasant walks, museums and other large attractions like the Sea Life Centre. It is a great place to visit; in fact, I would recommend making it a destination for your staycation. But, if you are visiting by boat, you will find that the city centre has a four-day restriction. The moorings ‘trial’ of last year is now to be made permanent. Well, you wouldn’t want to spend more of the trust’s cash on another set of blue signs, would you?

You will need to ascend the Wolverhampton 21 out of the Trent Valley, at least 42 locks including the Hatton and Lapworth flights from the River Avon Valley or the Curdworth, Minworth, Aston and Farmers Bridge flights up from the Tame Valley. One route from the Severn Valley includes Tardebigge Flight and many, many more locks. There was no shortage of moorings last year. But then there was no shortage the year before either. How can one measure the success of the trial? Boat movement data would suggest that fewer boats tried to get there at all.

Weather takes its toll

We have just come through the wettest February in history for many parts of the country. I think there have been 16 named storms since the start of September and it is now very evident that climate change and weather events are here to stay. There have been two major landslips that have brought boating on the North Oxford Canal and the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to a halt. One was in a known unstable cutting. I have been boating very gently through it for almost 20 years. There have been signs encouraging boaters to slow down. It took many trees down with it when it finally collapsed.

But this has been an accident waiting to happen!

What a pity the trust could not have been proactive and shored the cutting up before it ended up in the canal. No doubt someone will put their thinking cap on and find that the trust in fact saved money by putting this work off. I also wonder whether there has been a scrabble to reopen the navigation as quickly as possible or whether there has been a long-term engineered solution to ensure that it does not happen again in the near future. There has also been the first double paddle failure of the year, meaning that some work has had to be done on a defective paddle rather than covering it with a yellow bag.

As reported in the last edition of TowpathTalk, the 2023 lock usage data has been published. Overall it shows that there have been two fewer lock movements than in the year before. Active boating has shrunk. Does less activity indicate less interest?

In general, it has always been my intention to be part of a generation that leaves this world a better place for its children and grandchildren. I think that being actively involved in life is one way of keeping that aim at the forefront of my mind. Unfortunately, though, it appears that there is a dearth of volunteers to keep things going. This month I have heard that a region of the AWCC has not got enough people to keep it going, leading to a merger; an IWA local group that used to help in organising a large canal festival has too few members willing to become a committee and the national Inland Waterways Association has not been able to recruit organisers for its organising committee for the Festival of Water. We are fortunate in NABO to have an active council that is not just retired people coming to the end of their contributing years. We need to encourage many more people who are in their middle years to come on board and promote the boating way of life.