The Wet Web
Helen Gazeley reports on the recent All Party Parliamentary Group for the Waterways meeting which was held online.
THE idyllic scene of a canal running past hedges, fields and gently rolling hills looks so slowpaced and natural now that we forget what an upheaval these waterways caused when they were first built.
This was something that Liz McIvor reminded attendees at last month’s meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Waterways (APPGW). The theme was History and
Architecture of our Waterways but explored far more than just a timeline.
Liz McIvor will be no stranger to many. Her book Canals: The Making of a Nation was published in 2015 and accompanied a BBC TV series of the same name. (Clips can be viewed on the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p0342hz1). She pointed to how, without realising, we live with the legacy of canal development, with places such as Worsley in Salford, where the packet house originally sold tickets for the water taxi, still a transport hub for the area.
For the second speaker, Jo Bell, who was the inaugural
Canal Laureate 2013-15, the network is not just a physical entity. It forms what she describes as psychogeography and in the past created, she pointed out, a very different navigational map of the UK, filled with a web of water routes that would have meant much freer movement to travellers up to 200 years ago than the roads at the time.
Jo lives on a narrowboat and describes herself as living ‘inside an industrial monument’. An industrial archaeologist who, at one point, was looking after 10 historic cargo- carrying narrowboats, she, like Liz, emphasises that our canal network runs deep in the national consciousness without our being aware of it.
And because the people who worked the canals, for the most part, couldn’t write, the culture they had was expressed through their vessels. Roses and Castles are well known, but there were also lace plates and arrays of polished door knobs that no one now quite understands. As an aside, it’s worth noting that artwork was full of local differences. Jo’s partner, Phil Speight, is an expert practitioner of the art of Roses and Castles and is able to tell who painted a piece in what boatyard and from what region (bit.ly/3mir6D1).
The final speaker was Hugh Pearman MBE, writer, architecture critic and former editor of the RIBA journal. He picked up Jo’s point that the canals, after the industrial age and the holiday age, have entered a residential age.
Remarkable
Across the UK, 27,000 people live on the canal network—equivalent to a town the size of Lichfield, as Michael Fabricant, MP for Lichfield since 1992 and chairman of the APPGW, pointed out. This is remarkable when you think that, during the 1860s, there were 18,000 families living on the Cut.
Hugh took attendees through an illustrated range of good and bad developments along the network and picked out for praise waterwayled developments such as Port Loop, Birmingham (www.portloop.com) which do not turn their back on the canal but incorporate it into the design. The problem with developers is that they often have no concept of what makes a boaterfriendly environment.
All speakers agreed that our canals need government support, and that London should not be seen as the norm. There’s no doubt in the capital that very many people living on boats are doing so because they cannot afford a house or flat. This means, however, they tend to regard their environment differently from other liveaboarders around the country.
APPGW talks always finish with a discussion, and this meeting was no different. Points arising included the suggestion that anyone working for the Canal & River Trust would benefit from a short training session on the history and importance of regional differences of the network, and the observation that modern buildings are much harder to maintain than those of the traditional materials of brick and stone.