How Canals Played An Important Role In The History Of London | Our History

canals played a huge role in the growth of london's economy in the early years of the industrial revolution the roads between cities like birmingham and london were atrocious and this was why the canals got built in its heyday the waterways network covered over 5 000 miles and carried some 30 million tons of freight across britain every year [Music] in 1800 the grand junction canal was opened running from brentford in london up to braunston on the oxford canal this was a sort of shortcut because the old way from birmingham down to london was to go all the way down the oxford canal and then down the thames this cut 60 miles off the journey but it still took four days nevertheless in the 19th century the canals were the motorways of the country richard what was it like in the early days of canals there was no hard surfacing on the roads there were muddy rutty carrying goods by water is quite efficient the boat carries 25 tonnes or more that couldn't be equaled on the road no there certainly weren't huge juggernauts were there but but hang on a sec they've got to pull this 25 30 tonnes along yes was it men who did this before they built the canals in the 17th century they did have teams of men towing boats yes but they later used horses and donkeys but men could actually pull large noses could i pull this boat you could do okay i'm going to give it a go how much how much stuff have we got on here we've got about 16 tons 16 tons of sand and you reckon i could pull it and the boat weighs about 15 tons oh so 30. but you can push the boat with one hand just lean on it i'm gonna try okay watch me now then i'm not at all sure that i can do this 30 tons is an awful lot okay richard are you ready okay just leaning into it losing my weight now that's 31 tons of boat and i guess we're probably doing one mile an hour now see if we can go a little bit faster accelerating this must be two miles an hour well it's very difficult to get things moving that's because of their inertia but once it's going it's not bad because once it's got momentum it's not going to lose it there's no friction that's the great advantage of carrying freight by water anyway i reckon i've done a couple of hundred yards now and obviously i could go all the way into london but i think perhaps i'll let somebody else take over oh [Music] i found someone to pull the boat well i think anyway this is hector and this is vicky and i think hector is going to do the pulling is that right so he has pulled boats before has he hasn't pulled a boat before lots of other things but not a boat how much can a big horse like this carry on its back well these horses used to carry the knights in shining armor so um sort of 30-40 stone wow so that's about a quarter of a ton yeah but for a limited amount of time and how much could it pull in a cart um a single horse will pull a couple of times a couple of times so how much on a boat probably limitless really now do you think hector will pull our bugs i hope so okay well let's have a go go on hector steady steady it's a big boat back there i know i've pulled it whoa that was a nasty shot wasn't it i guess they never used to tarmac the towpath do they no that's right once he realizes that it moves slowly when he moves slowly he'll pick it up there you go he's starting to get the hang of it oh yes so he has horses are very quick to learn an easy way of life [Laughter] i thought they had very small brains they it's wonderful to see how hector's learnt this new skill he's learned that walking on the grass is better than walking on the asphalt and he's also learnt that it's better to go slowly because then the boat follows along rather than trying to heave along at 30 miles an hour in fact horses were so efficient at pulling barges they were in use until the 1950s when tractors came in and then of course the boats began to get engines on board i think he thinks it's lunchtime but not all canals are straight so what happened at the bends you sometimes find a curious thing where the toe path goes from a straight bit like this and then has a kink the horse has to walk round the corner here pulling the rope which therefore pulls against the stones on the corner of this brickwork so they put up this iron post to protect it now the rope's wet and it's got a lot of grit on it and it actually wears these grooves in the arm post just look at these enormous you could hide your finger in there just from a wet rope covered in grit pulling over the ears against this iron post you can see these all over the canal network one problem canal builders had to face was the hill suppose you came to a hill you had three options you could either go round it following the contours which was obviously a long way around or you could go straight through it through a tunnel but digging tunnels was very expensive or you could go over the top now the trouble with the third option is that you can't build canals at an angle because all the water would run down to the bottom end and here it would be dry and you couldn't get anywhere you have to make canals dead level so the only way to go over a hill is by building locks in the early days of canals the only thing they had to impede the flow of water was what was called a flash lock imagine you're looking along the canal here here is basically just a dam that is a flash lock and so when it was full of water the water didn't flow through downstream but if you wanted to go through this on a boat well if you're upstream there and you open the paddle the boat would go it would go thundering through extremely dangerous it was liable to capsize and there wasn't much chance of being able to go upstream in the 1500s they came up with an impressive but simple solution on the canals today there are pound locks like this they have two pairs of gates with a stretch of water in the middle which is the pound and the point is you can always keep one pair of gates shut so the water doesn't go careering downstream we want to go down the canal so we need to raise the water level inside the pond to match the level on our side of the lock a windlass is used to crank open paddles in the gates letting in up to 50 000 gallons of water only when the water levels are equal can we open the gates the boat then enters the pond so now what we have to do is to shut the upstream lock gates and you'll notice they meet at an angle so mitred gate allegedly invented by leonardo da vinci and the point is that then the moment there is any extra pressure from above that will push the gates tight together and prevent any leakage all right now we have to get the level in the pond down to the level of the canal below so what we do is to raise these paddles because there are holes in the lock gates and you can see the water goes streaming through and the level here goes down and done until it's the same both here and here and when that's the case then we can open these gates and then we could sail through into the canal below this is brentford where the canal originally met the river thames boats carrying everything from sulfur to aluminium ingots would enter and leave the canal network here tom how did the canal companies make money they made the money by charging so much per tonne per mile on depending on the cargo it was being carried okay so if you're carrying coal then you pay per ton of coal that's right okay and and what's all this info here well this is actually a page from a 1924 toll register what's this sheep dip do they carry sheep on board no no no i see it's come from birkhamstead it's a whole boatload 34 and a quarter tons it was probably being exported to somewhere like new zealand no doubt anyway now how did they measure the the tonnages each boat was gauged so they would take it to a special dock they'd put one tonne weights in and every one time they come in the line and then they would have great big documents and each boat would have how many dry inches for what tonnage so how do they measure the weights oh should i come in yeah yeah terrific okay tom what can you measure with this rod well with this rod you can measure the number of dry inches so the top is about 21 inches already 21 inches yeah that's above the water line that's above the water line but what you normally did to make sure there was no cheating you actually measured on four corners of the boat because they then averaged the four and then went back into the toll office looked on the charts and then for a particular boat that number of dry inches represented a certain tonnage but roughly for every extra ton you put on she will go down an edge okay so how much is there in there now with 21 16 16. yes that's brilliant thank you very much indeed 1801 saw the opening of a canal extension into central london by 1820 london was encircled by waterways as the grand junction and the regents canal were joined to form a link to the docks this is the paddington arm of the grand junction canal bringing all that trade down from the north so when they built the regents canal they wanted to siphon off some of this trade and so there is the regents canal deliberately built to join onto this stretch of water all those people down there wanted to siphon off some of this trade from up north and take it all the way down to the thames at limehouse it was a great business opportunity the name little venice comes from a poem by robert browning who lived nearby a kenny estate agent used the term while trying to sell a property and the name stuck this area of london is very built up so when they built the canal they had to construct three tunnels and getting through those tunnels without a horse was quite an adventure cheers cutting through central london is a quiet and largely forgotten stretch of water now home to fishermen walkers and pleasure boats the canals were once the heart of london's transport system this is the regents canal a major engineering feat and because it's going through highly built up places a lot of it had to go through tunnels in fact there are three of them this is the islington tunnel it's more than half a mile long now when you were building a tunnel you didn't really want to make it so wide that you could put a towpath along the side so there you had to take the horse round and leg the boat through now i'm not sure i like the side of that but let's see how it works now ed and maggie you're you're leggers i think is that right i think we've been volunteered you're not gonna like this thing are you we are we certainly are this is huge this boat yes but once it's got moving uh it doesn't need much effort it's just the initial effort to get it to get it to move right so how do you do it exactly you lie in your back and you walk along this side of the of the wall with your feet the side do that not the roof it depends on the tunnel you could on some tunnels right on this tunnel you'd walk from the side so without further ado we set off into the tunnel now we're just about into the mouth could you show me how you do it okay so you lie down on your side and then you just walk well we're definitely moving not terribly fast from there sir oh yeah it's working isn't it so you're just walking yes do you think i could do it yes do you want to have a go oh yes please so i just lie down on your side yes get your feet up high feet up high up there somewhere easier really too high that's it oh hey that's not too bad that's it you need to push harder harder right well it's a bit like walking up a bit of a hill you have to work in tandem with the other person on the other side right so that you both push the same the same amount here's all the good we must be doing we must be doing two two miles an hour yes and so we've got half a mile to go it's only going to take us a quarter now to get through faster aid faster go i'm going fast enough you've got to go faster all right i'll do my best i don't want to say anything but that other end doesn't seem to be getting any closer we've only gone in about 80 foot it's dark here i gave up after about 10 minutes but it took maggie and ed another 20 to get through the tunnel luckily six years after the canal opened a steam chain tug was installed to tow the boats most of the traffic on the regents canal carried goods from limehouse stocks coal from the north of england and cargo from abroad would be transferred from sea going vessels to barges and narrowboats this is battle bridge basin just north of kings cross there were basins like this dotted all along the regents canal with great warehouses because this was where a whole mass of trade happened goods would come in by canal and go out by canal all over the country and in this particular basin there was one rather unusual form of produce right here they unloaded vast blocks of ice cut from frozen lakes in norway and they brought it here to carlo gatti's heist house these ice wells were built around 150 years ago and were in use for 50 years there used to be 13 meters deep and they held 1500 tons of ice absolutely amazing once more the insulation was very effective because in all the time from when the ice was cut in norway to when it was brought here to when it was taken out to the customer only a quarter of the ice melted really impressive that up there it's a warm sunny day but down here it's cool and quite spooky and extremely damp just look at the water running down the wall there that must be coming from the canal i hope it's not going to fill this place up because it's a long way up those steps now the victorians didn't really have fridges they weren't available so they needed ice to keep things cool and in fact they used to be taken all the ice used to be taken from here by horse and cart all over the capital and used by people in cooking and also by mr gatti and other um caterers in making ice cream now this i reckon is the door straight into the canal god it's all rotting look this would have just fallen out i think i'm gonna move thanks to mr gassy ice cream became available to the public all through the year and basically you'd buy a little ice lick like this one this is a sort of glass egg cup really with a tiny bit of ice cream in the bottom and what you do is you take your lick like this and then you hand it back to be refilled for the next person passing on all your germs thankfully for us islix were banned in 1926. by the 1870s competition from the railways was threatening the canals however there was one cargo the railways were reluctant to touch gunpowder the lee river in northeast london has been used for transporting goods in and out of the city for centuries and in the lee valley there's a whole complex of hidden canals especially useful here at waltham abbey because this is where they made the best gunpowder in the world we're in the lee valley here right why was all this navigation business so important well well the importance of the site at waltham abbey is that we're about 15 miles or so from the thames there's along the thames it had good connections to the town of london that was used for storing gunpowder and greenwich but was also vital for in importing the ingredients of gunpowder right by about 1900 there's a network of about five miles of canals within this one factory and this canal network was used to move the gunpowder or the later high explosives even between the process buildings a mixture of saltpeter sulfur and charcoal gunpowder when ignited produces huge volumes of gas almost instantaneously and that's an explosion transportation by water was by far the safest option why did they start making gunpowder here there's all a way of ensuring that british had the best quality of gunpowder in the world so you reckon that was crucial for the napoleonic wars it was absolutely crucial i believe right so is this gentleman here anything to do with that i think he may be well let's go and see excuse me sir who are you i'm corporal sherwood of the second queen's royal regiment of foot uh and are you about to go and shoot somebody i might shoot conquers off the tree well yeah but that's presumably not what you're paid to do no i'm going off to spain to fight the french ah the peninsula war you're loaded with black powder i am and grape shot what else have you got a ball down there you have oh all right i'll stand well back [Applause] mist close you frightened it you've certainly frightened the starling out of the back of the tree well that's terrific thanks very much indeed and good luck in spain well transporting the gunpowder by water was as safe as they could do but it wasn't totally without risk in 1874 the centre of london was rocked by an enormous explosion in the early hours of one october morning a barge the tilbury was being towed along here in this deep cutting on the northern edge of regents park as it went under macclesfield bridge the five tons of gunpowder on board blew up and there was a colossal explosion the hull of the top of the bridge was lifted off rubble went heaving into the air damaging houses hundreds of yards away in fact the keel of the barge the tilbury was blown into the air with such force that it fell on a house and went all the way through to the cellar all the residents came running out thinking there was an attack the bang was so loud it was heard 20 miles away and the horse cards came galloping up thinking there was an irish insurrection it's been called blow up bridge ever since these cast iron pillars made in colebrookdale and presumably brought down on the canals actually survived the explosion although they were knocked over if you look here you can see more of these grooves where the ropes from the barge horses wore their way into the iron but have a look on the other side and you'll see there are grooves here too and obviously these were the original grooves and then after the pillars had been knocked over by the explosion they were put up the other way round in order to equalize the wear if you like in the 1930s the canals were joined together to form the grand union canal company in an attempt to fight back against competition from road and rail but it was too late and the canals went into decline the end of freight carrying on the canals came with the big freeze in the winter of 1963 and all the water here was frozen solid no barges could move for three months and all the trade simply evaporated luckily more uses have been found since then obviously recreational uses and also on the topics down here there are thousands of miles of electricity cables cooled by the water from the canal it was thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts that the canal's fortunes have been slowly revived these once commercial waterways are now welcoming recreational use when the canals were first built nobody wanted to live anywhere near them because they were regarded as a grubby arm of industry but now there are masses of pleasure boats and living by the canal is highly desirable in fact these houses are exceedingly exclusive even a mooring here costs something like seven or eight thousand pounds every year i knew i wouldn't mind living here perhaps i could just sneak in between two of these boats [Music] you

Channel: Our History

Views: 17,750

Keywords: our history, documentary, world history documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, london, history of london, london canals, london history, adam hart-davis, canals of london, how london was built

Id: edBtW3xLz48

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021