Sunday 20 September 2009

But Gnosall Had No Boats At All!

The closure of the Shropshire Union Canal at Shebdon embankment is having a huge effect on boat traffic locally. Yesterday, from waking aboard Starcross at 07.10 to setting off for Grub Street at 09.40 and then finally tying up back at Norbury Junction at 11.45 apart from Norbury Wharf's day boat, which was just setting out I saw no moving boats whatsoever.

The usually-busy visitor moorings at Gnosall were almost empty and although there were more boats at Norbury Junction many of them were the local liveaboards and bridge-hoppers rather than the hireboats and visiting craft we usually see at this time of year.

The fishermen looked a bit happier though!

Wednesday 16 September 2009

Is This What a Privatised British Waterways Would Be Like?

Worsley is a potential honeypot spot on the Bridgewater Canal. Arguably the birthplace of the modern canal system and the first place where coal was extracted from underground mines and transported by boat - in this case to Manchester on the then new Duke of Bridgewater's Canal from 1761. Its also an interesting and pleasant spot in its own right with its village green, old packhorse bridge and plethora of black-and-white houses making it seem like a little piece of up-market Cheshire in urban Salford.

Boaters will know it for the "Packet House" (seen above); the Duke's original boathouse and the present-day dry dock. Its also the last attractive mooring place on the canal before Manchester city centre or the edge of the conurbation if heading south through Altincham on the Bridgewater's Runcorn line as well as being one of the few spots in Greater Manchester that I'd be happy about leaving a boat unattended for a few days. You can see why its popular with boaters.
So what does the Bridgewater Canal Company provide for them at this boating mecca? Well, apart from a few mooring rings partly buried in the overgrown towpath there's...er.....this:



If you pluck up the courage to unlock (with your BW key!) and open the unmarked door, and can negotiate the wet and slippery floor, you'll come across this:
One of three cubicles containing a toilet and a cold water tap and sink but no hand drying facilities. If nature calls after the hours of darkness, please note that the building is not only unlit - but appears to have no means of interior illumination whatsoever!


Nicholson's Guide mentions a water point. Its not obvious - but eventually I found it:

(Its the tap half way up the wall on the right in a room which presumably, in the absence of any other facility is used by boaters to empty their chemical toilets!) And that's Worsley sanitary station - a fine example of go-ahead, thrusting, customer-focused private enterprise!

OK, so BW's not perfect, but compare this to a typical sanitary station found on the publicly-owned network (let alone the superb clean, warm and well-lit facility at Norbury Junction with disabled loo and free showers).

Mind you, some people just won't accept that sometimes BW gets it right. Commenting to a fellow boater who'd just finished taking water from the tap in the toilet I said something to the effect of "Come back BW, all is forgiven") He gave me a strange look and said - slowly - "some of theirs aren't up to much neither". But then, according to its signwriting, his boat is based on the Barnsley Canal and as this closed in 1953 perhaps its not surprising if British Waterways is limiting its spending on providing facilities for boaters there at the moment.

Monday 14 September 2009

Jerusalem (Lancs.)

"Captain Ahab" on Wand'ring Bark recently left a comment on one of my posts bemoaning the loss of canalside industry. He should go to Leigh!

Leigh is where the Leigh branch of the Leeds & Liverpool meets the Leigh branch of the Bridgewater Canal, thus forming a through route between Wigan and Worsley. Its a small industrial town, of a sort found across the north of England, but unlike some of its larger neighbours - such as Manchester and even Wigan - its waterfront areas have not been gentrified or even developed very much. This part of south Lancashire was a mining and cotton spinning area so the canalside industries were collieries and cotton mills. The former have disappeared (although a canalside pit museum survives at Astley) but - in Leigh at least - the mills survive and are some are still in industrial use, although perhaps no longer for cotton spinning. Here are two of mills still visible to the boater passing through the town.




In the 1970s and '80s I used to drive regularly between Manchester and the West Riding of Yorkshire on the M62 and have vivid memories of the huge number of mills like these that were visible from the motorway firstly falling out of use and then being demolished, until today very few, if any, remain. It was good to see them surviving in Leigh: I never found them particularly dark or satanic but then I didn't have to work in one!

Friday 11 September 2009

Planks......

....or "How to Upset the Crew of a Day Boat"

The Leigh branch of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal is not renowned for its scenic beauty or architectural interest. Quite frankly, it's boring - consisting of 7 miles of mainly straight and level canal with, apart from the yachting lake at Scotsman's Flash, not a lot to look at. Its only redeeming feature is the lift bridge at Plank Lane.


The bridge carries a very busy road across the canal and its lack of width means that road traffic can only pass in one direction at a time, controlled by signals, so that queues build up at the best of times even without boats adding to the delays. Not surprisingly, therefore, British Waterways employs a bridge keeper to operate it.

Approaching the bridge we saw the red light and noticed a boat tied up and waiting for it to open. It was a day boat, out from Bridgewater Marina, and we were puzzled at first to find the crew waving us past. On drawing level, they attempted to engage us in conversation but the combination of a wide canal and Sunshine's Lister SR2 thumping away meant we could'nt hear what they were saying apart from "15 minutes". As the bridge clearly wasn't going to open we pulled in and tied up in front of them. Now, I have to admit that we were perhaps guilty of a little stereotyping here! The crew were numerous, many of them on the roof, most of them smoking and drinking from cans of a semi - beer-like substance known, I believe, as "lager". I don't think most readers will be surprised to hear that we didn't particularly think engaging them in polite conversation was a high priority (although we didn't particularly make a point of ignoring them either). Instead we set off to find out when the bridge was likely to open and then got talking to a crew member from a boat waiting to come through from the other side.

Eventually the bridge-keeper returned from lunch and opened up. We hung back to allow the day boat to go through first, but as it did so one of its passengers let go with a stream of invective, calling us the "most miserable and unfriendly people he had ever met"; using all the conventional swear words he could think of to describe us and then, to top it all, accused us of being "cricket lovers" *(something to do with my hat that was keeping off the rain at the time) and - the ultimate insult - "middle class!!" **

We were too bemused by his onslaught to react (which upset him even more) and when we'd had time to think about it we decided to stop for our own lunch and let them get well ahead. Unfortunately, this was to no avail as although we took our time, when we reached Leigh what should be tied up outside the pub at Bridge 66 but the day boat. Our "friend" from Plank Lane was still aboard and our approach merely prompted him into a repeat performance, culminating in an all too predicable "mooning" (Not being Andrew Denny on Granny Buttons I didn't have my camera to hand so I'll have to spare you that sight).

But not all day boats are bad news. Shortly afterwards, we encountered another from Bridgewater Marina, this one full of a twentysomthings hen party, all dressed as sailors, enjoying themselves VERY much and heading towards bridge 66.

I wonder what happened when they met?

* I can tell you who won the Ashes this year, but that's about it.

** You'll have to judge for yourself - I have a middle management job in the public sector but my father was a factory worker and bus driver and I was brought up in a council house in south Wales.

Thursday 10 September 2009

So Farewell Then, Langley Maltings

Photo of Langley Maltings (c) Tim lloydlangston made available under Creative Commons Licence
The historic, 130 year old former maltings on the BCN at Oldbury have been destroyed in a fire, believed to be caused by arsonists. Originally the Showell's Maltings and part of the Crosswell's brewing empire, the grade II-listed buildings were last used by Banks's brewery, closing in 2006.
Press reports suggest that although no planning application had been submitted, there were plans by new owners to convert them into flats - a job that will be much easier now that there will be no listed-building status to constrain them! Meanwhile, another canalside landmark disappears.

There's more about it here and here

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Wigan Locks

I have a little health problem at the moment that,whilst it doesn't keep me off the cut, doesn't allow me to do much in the way of winding paddles or moving lock gates so when I was asked if I could help move nb "Sunshine" from Adlington to Manchester - a journey that involves the descent of 21 locks of the Wigan flight - I jumped at the chance.

Sunshine was tied up opposite the marina at Adlington and when I arrived, Bernard was in the middle of an oil change. By the time he'd completed this and we'd eaten a belated lunch and got away it was mid-afternoon, so we didn't arrive at the top of the flight until nearly four o'clock. We nearly didn't arrive at all - I'd forgotten the sharp right turn that leads to the locks and was so busy puzzling out how to negotiate the apparent barrier of weed in the channel ahead that I almost didn't notice we'd got to the locks and nearly overshot the junction.

This section was originally intended to be part of the Lancaster Canal and to run to Westhoughton or even, in one plan, to Worsley where it would have joined up with the Bridgewater Canal and this is the way you go (for 100 metres or so) if you don't turn right for the locks.

Nicholson's Guide says that the locks are now "not as daunting as they once where." I'm not sure what they've done to take the "daunt" out of them though as two broken paddles and one left slightly open by a previous boater meant that it took us over 20 minutes to get through the top lock and a quick calculation showed that as this rate we still be going through after dark.

Things did improve after that although many of the gates were leaking badly

as were some of the lock walls


The top half of the flight has a veneer of rurality about it, although one suspects that behind the trees the semi-industrial landscape of south Lancashire is never far away.

The surroundings become more urban as you descend and approach the town centre, although even here things are not as gloomy as you might expect. Expectations (or is it experience?) of security issues have presumably lead the inhabitants of this former lock cottage to take quite heavy-duty precautions although the owners of these more modern dwellings a few metres away don't share their concerns (or, again, perhaps their experience?)
Being banned from lock work I had to concentrate on the steering - and making the occasional cup of tea for Kristine and Bernard. I also had plenty of time to observe the locks at close quarters and to see that they are actually numbered in two seperate series - the present-day system, under which the locks are numbered from the Leeds end and an older system ( OK, I know its not that old) under which the numbers run uphill from Wigan!
It took us the best part of four hours to negotiate the flight, which is not bad given one unfit crew member and most of the locks being "against" us and we were grateful to tie up at the visitor moorings just past the junction with the Leigh branch at around eight o' clock.

The photo was taken the following morning, after which we had to be on our way as these obviously desireable moorings (with a noisy recycling depot behind the wall) have a 24 hour limit!

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Only in Manchester

Having been invited to join Kris and Bernard and help take "Sunshine" down the Wigan locks I travelled up to Adlington to meet them. The journey involved changing not just trains but also stations in Manchester and I was looking forward to it.

I suppose most people have a soft spot for the city in which they spent their student days - and I certainly do. In fact I made several unsuccessful attempts to leave the Manchester area before finally coming to live in Hereford and even then I had regrets about leaving. I can never walk out of the front doors of Piccadilly station without a feeling of excitement and of being glad to be back and this time was no different. Although there are various ways of travelling between Piccadilly and Victoria stations I opted to walk to enjoy the city at close quarters. Within minutes I was reminded of why I like the place so much. Calling in at a cafe for a tea and a bacon butty and stopping in a couple of shops to buy things I'd forgotten to bring I was immediately reminded of how friendly everyone is. In Hereford its a condition of the job that shop assistants are miserable, but in Manchester - even in large city centre shops - the staff will tell you that they hope you enjoy your day (and then look out of the window at the rain and say - "Oh!...well enjoy it as much as you can". Only in this city will a stranger come up to you looking at a window display in the transport bookshop and say "'t little train's not running today - they usually 'as it goin' back and forth" leading to a conversation about the state of Britain's railways!

I was quite sorry when I finally got to Victoria and it was time, yet again, to leave the city. This time, however, not for very long....

Tuesday 1 September 2009

Its Lke the M6 Up Here!

"Its like the M6 up here today" said the boater, sat on his mooring at Shebdon Wharf as Starcross crept by on tickover. Its a traditional summer greeting on this part of the Shroppie as boaters intent on completing the "Four" Counties Ring speed by in convoy in both directions.

But at the moment its being used very much tongue in cheek! Mind you, I could see his point: for him, every northbound boat, including Starcross, was followed minutes later by a southbound boat (including Starcross) that had just winded at the current limit of Navigation of the "Southern Shroppie "at Shebdon.

Canalside businesses must be suffering. The Wharf Inn at Shebdon is virtually inaccessible to boaters and the moorings at the Anchor at High Offley were quiet. There was plenty of space at the visitor moorings at Norbury Junction as well, although the Junction Inn and Norbury Wharf's cafe get much of their weekend trade from car-borne visitors. On a two-hour bank holiday trip up to Shebdon and back I passed a total of five moving boats - last bank holiday that would have been 25 and it proves the point that early waterway campaigners made that its the network that matters and an interconnected system of through routes is much more attractive - and viable - than a series of dead ends.

Big Hole in Canal - BW looking into it!

Yesterday was the first chance I'd had to go up to the Shroppie and have a look at the "leak" that's closed the Shropshire Union Canal at Shebdon embankment, just north of Starcross' mooring at Norbury Junction.

There's not much to see: British Waterways has closed the canal and fenced off the towpath. The hole appeared in the bed of the canal towards the Knighton end of the embankment and, from the old Cadbury's wharf, you can get near enough to get a view of the coffer dam and the empty canal beyond.
British Waterways has helpfully placed explanatory notices on the towpath fencing, complete with photographs of "the hole".
There is less to see from the Shebdon side: the canal here is closed just north of the winding hole and a considerable distance from the leak. Neither boats nor towpath users should be able to get anywhere near - although a couple of boats seem to have sneaked past the barrier in this shot and I must confess that I had strayed a few feet past the existing hole in the barrier across the footpath that leads down to the Wharf Inn.
Strangely, BW has placed the towpath barriers such that there is no access at all from the towpath to the Wharf Inn even though boats can tie up just south of the winding hole. It can't be good for trade and the pub certainly looked deserted for a bank holiday lunchtime.
BW's latest estimate is that the canal should be open by the school half-term in October, which is just in time for the winter stoppages that will see the canal closed all winter at Wheaton Aston embankment and at Nantwich embankment between January and March. The great embankments are a major feature of the canal but they continue to cause problems as they always have done!