THE GRAND JUNCTION CANAL - a highway laid with water.

A HIGHWAY LAID WITH WATER.

An account of the Grand Junction Canal, 1792 - 1928, with a postscript.
By
Ian Petticrew and Wendy Austin.

――――♦――――

INTRODUCTION

The Bridgewater Canal was Britain’s first true canal. Opened in 1761, it quickly demonstrated the feasibility of using a man-made waterway to move heavy loads comparatively quickly over distance. The many canals built during the following decades to exploit this novel ability were to become both cause and effect of the rapid industrialisation of the Midlands and the north of England. Better transport communication made centralised industrial manufacture viable and was thus an important factor in bringing about the transition from cottage industry to the factory system.

Completion of the Oxford Canal in 1790 provided a link between our growing canal network and London. However, the route was unsatisfactory; not only was it over-long, but the section that relied on the River Thames below Oxford was difficult to navigate. The need for a more direct and reliable waterway to link the Capital with the Midlands and the north of England led to the construction of the Grand Junction Canal.

At its northern end, the Grand Junction Canal forms a junction with the Oxford Canal at Braunston in Northamptonshire. It then follows a south-easterly course via Wolverton, Leighton, Tring and Uxbridge to reach the River Thames at Brentford, with an important branch from Hayes to Paddington.

A sketch map of the Grand Union Canal in 1938, the Grand Junction Canal having by then been absorbed into this larger network (the branch to Buckingham had been virtually abandoned).

Construction commenced in 1793. By 1800, the Canal was substantially complete, a short gap remaining between Stoke Bruerne and Blisworth where civil engineering problems with the long Blisworth Tunnel delayed final completion until 1805. For some years thereafter the Canal was very profitable, but from the 1840s onwards it fell into commercial decline as the railways gradually captured its long distance trade. Throughout the industry, canal companies were forced to reduce their tariffs to barely economic levels to retain what business they could in the face of this new and voracious competition ― many went to the wall.

In 1894 the Grand Junction Canal Company bought two of the Leicestershire canals, by then on the verge of bankruptcy, thereby extending its domain to Leicester. Then, in 1929, the Company amalgamated with the owners of the Regent’s and Warwick canals to form the Grand Union Canal Company, thereby bringing under single ownership the waterway from Brentford and Limehouse on the Thames, to Birmingham. Further canal purchases in 1932 extended the network from Leicester to the River Trent and onwards to the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border. But despite the Company bringing a greater mileage of canals under unified control and investing heavily in improvements, rail and increasingly road continued to dominate the transport industry. A growing shortage of boatmen prepared to accept the rigors of canal life added to the Company’s difficulties.

By the mid-1950s, only the section of the Canal below Uxbridge remained commercially viable. A decade later, trade had diminished to negligible proportions, but by then canal carrying was being superseded by leisure cruising, a fact recognised in the 1968 Transport Act, which gave British Waterways a remit to develop our inland waterways for leisure use. Today the Grand Union Canal (as it now is) carries more leisure traffic during the summer season than its predecessor did commercial traffic during its heyday as a major arterial highway.

The following account deals with these events in more detail ― we hope you find it interesting . . . .

FOREWORD . . . .