[Tealeaf]

Well Bert,



There are several big “What If” questions there and the number of answers to those is invariably infinite. However, the idea of Brunel building canals through Accrington and applying 1840’s engineering solutions to the local topography is fascinating.



My understanding of the specifications of the canals built throughout England in the 1770’s through to the 1800’s is that they were constrained firstly, by the power source of the traffic they were designed for, i.e. the horse-pulled barge and the load limitation that this entailed, and secondly by the hesitation of various landowners to facilitate the passage of the canal over their land, hence the various compromises and cajoling to be found in the various Acts of Parliament legalising the construction of each canal. In sum, this meant that every canal constructed was wide enough to allow barges to pass in opposite directions and that the use of a lock or a “long route” round was not always determined by time logic but by who owned the land in the first instance.



And that is why there appears to be no straightforward answer to the question of “why doesn’t the canal go through Accrington? The guy who writes on the Blackburn Libraries website (www.cottontowns.org) says that the canal was initially planned to enter Accy and cross the Hyndburn “near the old Grammar School”…but I think he means roughly where the Asda is now. However, according to him, this route was vetoed by the Peel family because they feared “pollution” upstream of Peel Bank & hence it had to cross downstream of the Peel Works (which the writer correctly describes as one of the worlds largest industrial complexes at the time). However, I don’t accept the pollution argument – I think by this time the river would have been polluted upstream, anyway.



I think the real reason that the canal does a sharp 90 degree left-hander at Church is quite simply that the industrial complex – which was still under development – wanted a piece of the action. It wanted what modern politicians would now term “an integrated transport policy” combined with a “just in time” delivery policy. And that is exactly what it got – right up to and including it’s own branch of the canal leading directly into one of it’s own manufactories. The equivalent today would be to have a direct 6-lane link road going from the M65 directly into Express Gifts at Church (same site, by the way and the largest employer in Hyndburn)



The most logical route from Rishton, instead of making the 2 mile hairpin bend round Church through to Clayton would surely have been would surely have been to build an embankment over the river between the Rishton and a point halfway between Church and Clayton and then to continue along the hillside up from Hyndburn Road (i.e. roughly at the top part of Gatty/Milnshaw Park), and then to swing in the Burnley direction with a cutting & locks. O.K – I accept that transferring through Locks is a time laborious process, but it would still be quicker than doing the loop round Rishton/Clayton/Church – and Accy would have got it’s canal!



Once again, though, logic is overcome by power – this time the landowners of the Dunkenhalgh estate. There is no way they are going to have a canal embankment running right past their front door. In fact, this stuck up bunch of snobs even insist that the canal towpath is diverted on to the other side of the canal so that the Church riff-raff can’t come wandering down it pinching their rabbits! (Never stopped quite a few I know though). That’s why you have to go under & over the canal bridge at Church & why the next two bridges are swing bridges! For the Dunkenhalgh Estate, the canal almost becomes a moat.





So there we go. But lets just get back to Brunel. I think possibly if he had have been building in the 1840’s, and then the canals then would have been designed to accommodate steam power, so they would have been wider. Because construction techniques were better and because more money was available (there was no competition to finance the Napoleonic Wars), then they would have been far more radical in their use of cuttings & embankments. I think Accy would have got its canal then, but it would have been more like the Manchester Ship Canal coming through the centre of town.

Anyway, I've been writing this on the train, occaisionally looking out the window and glancing at the Grand Union Canal. Very nice - but not as nice as ours!