Canal that helped to build a town
How best to cross the Pennines
IT WAS the feat of engineering that brought goods made in Huddersfield to customers around the world, and helped to build both industry in the area and the town itself.
Now the Hudderfield Narrow Canal, and the five kilometreking Standedge Tunnel that burrows beneath the Pennines from Marsden to Diggle, has been named as one of the top 200 influential people and projects, past and present, which illustrate how civil engineering has shaped the world and transformed people’s lives for the better.
The accolade, given by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) to mark its 200th anniversary and the Government’s Year of Engineering, champions “inspirational and worldchanging projects” from around the world, and has already been bestowed upon the Humber Bridge, York Railway Station and Blackpool Tower in the UK.
The canal, which was restored as a tourist attraction in 2001, was once a key part of the country’s transport network, at a time when railways and motorways were still to come. The tunnel was not only the highest in the country at 32km, but also the deepest and the longest.
Work began on the project in 1796, when Huddersfield’s mills were producing cotton, wool and other textiles, and a solution was needed to get the products out of West Yorkshire, across the north and beyond. However, the early years of the project were beset by problems, and costs overrun, and in 1807 civil engineer Thomas Telford was brought in to “create the tunnel we know today,” Helen Braidwood, civil engineer for the Canal and River Trust, said.
“In the 1800s, the canal network was basically like our motorways today, used to get everything to and from towns and cities,” she said. “It was a very slow system because nothing was powered, there was no petrol to power the boats, everything was horse drawn, so the tow paths at the side of the canal were designed for the horses to walk along.
“At Standedge Tunnel, there isn’t a tow path through the tunnel because of the extra costs they would have incurred and the extra engineering that would have been involved to create a bigger space. So what they used to do, was when the boats got to Marsden, then the boats would go through the tunnel and the horses would be walked over the top of the Pennines.” To get the boats through, men would lie on top of the canal boats and use their feet to “walk” along the roof of the tunnel, known as legging. It would take up to four hours or a boat full of cargo to get through the tunnel, and at its peak 40 boats a day would use it. “It brought a lot of industry to the area, and a lot of people too,” Ms Braidwood said.
The canal, and the tunnel, is now used for boat trips, and visitors can experience what it was like to travel through the tunnel 200 years ago.
Ms Braidwood, the civil engineer in charge of overseeing the canal today, added: “Civil engineers are the ones that designed and oversaw the construction of the Huddersfield canal and it’s fantastic to see this being identified as one of the 200 People and Projects.”
In the 1800s, the canal network was like our motorways today. Civil engineer Helen Braidwood.
LIKE THE Bingley Five Rise Locks on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the Huddersfield Narrow Canal is an equally impressive feat of engineering which helped to power the Industrial Revolution. Climbing 134 metres from Huddersfield to its summit at Standedge where it passes through the longest and deepest tunnel on the inland waterway network, boats then begin a steep descent into Greater Manchester.
Just 20 miles long, it’s still little wonder that Benjamin Outram’s groundbreaking canal has been singled out for praise by the Institution of Civil Engineers for the determination of pioneers not to be beaten by the geography of the Pennines. First floated in 1793 and opened in 1811, one of the best views of the canal is ironically from the transPennine railway where passengers on late-running and slow-moving trains must wonder whether they’d be better off making the journey by boat and why it’s not possible, in this day and age, to build a more reliable railway.