Today, I had a couple of
meetings near Manchester, and I had a bit of spare time,
so I visited three river crossings, all a bit strange, and all
with something in common. Although, I guess technically
these are canal crossings. But some of the canal is a diverted river. So... I went with river crossings,
it sounds better. My first stop was the Hulmes Ferry,
and I took my GoPro and my drone with me. Like all the three crossings, the Hulmes Ferry
goes over the Manchester Ship Canal. That canal runs for nearly 60 kilometres, starting in the Mersey Estuary
in the Irish Sea near Liverpool, and running through to Manchester. It's more than a century old. The canal is a massive engineering achievement. But it's not like the builders just smashed
through anything that was in their way. It was the Industrial Revolution, but still. The Act of Parliament that gave
permission for the canal, back in 1885, included a lot of requirements to make sure
all the landowners along the route were... well, if not happy, at least satisfied. Embankments or channels had to be
maintained or built, access had to be provided,
fees had to be paid. 300 pages of
technical legal details, some of which still apply to this day. Also, you'd think that by now, every bit of UK law would be
online and freely available, but no, I found most of this in archived Freedom of Information
on obscure things from years ago. Anyway. One of those legal requirements
from 1885 is a ferry, "by night and by day whenever required", to replace a low bridge
they had to knock down. If I'm being honest, there's not really
much need to have a ferry like that in the 21st century. You wouldn't start
a new ferry service there today. Yes, it was useful in the past, it's an hour's walk to get
to the other side... but unless you happen to live
really close to one side and work really close to the other, it's not much use. For almost every practical purpose,
it's quicker to drive. There are regular passengers:
so the ferry driver said in an interview a couple
of years ago, but not many. It's mostly walkers and cyclists
out for the fun of it. But my travel on it was logged, one more on the count of "people
who actually use this ferry". And I'll get back to why that happened later. A few kilometres west was my second stop,
the Thelwall Ferry. Actually, it might be "Tell-wall".
I didn’t meet anyone to ask, and there’s no official web site
or information about it, but it’s much the same arrangement, although this time with a small charge. Eleven pence. Oh, and that boat doesn't have an engine, it's just powered by a hard-working man
rowing you across, just as there's been for more than 120 years. Not the same man, obviously, and not the same boat either. And when I turned up, there was a small sign
in the window of the ferryman's cottage, saying that the service was suspended
due to low water levels in the canal. I'll be honest, those water levels looked
fine to me, but I'm not the expert. Low water levels aside,
the ferry continues, because the law says that “the Company shall work
the said ferry whenever required”. The Company, by the way, is called
the Peel Group these days, after a lot of buying and selling
and corporate renaming and mergers. They're an enormous property investment firm
who own the entire Manchester Ship Canal along with what seems like every major bit of land
and private infrastructure around Manchester. I've reached out to them with interview
requests before for other stuff, and they've always turned me down, so for this video I have to rely
on secondary sources, newspaper articles and quotes.
I don't like doing that, but from the look of some of those articles, it's not just me that they've
turn down requests from. Which is fair, they're absolutely
within their rights to do that. And, if I'm honest, the second reason that
I'm sorta-improvising here and relying on those quotes and articles... I only found out I was travelling
to Manchester yesterday morning! So I had to spend the entire rest
of the day just researching at home trying to get the law right. So: the Thelwall Ferry. Or Tell-wall. About 600 crossings a year, they say: some days there's barely anyone, other days
a whole walking club might turn up and want to go across
at eleven pence each. The third crossing, inbetween those two
ferries, is the Warburton Toll Bridge. Which is a deeply frustrating bridge
for a lot of people, because the toll to cross in a car is twelve pence. Or 25 pence, if you want a day pass. And there is often a queue.
Cash only, no change given. And it seems almost farcical
to have a toll collector, and a barrier, and sometimes
very long queues... for twelve pence a time. Except: when I got there
and I drove up… No charges! But, wanting to get the shot,
I turned round and went back over, and they were charging that way, but no day passes either. Just a man
with a coin bucket and no change. Uh... no daily ticket? That's 20p then! Thank you. [Toll operator] "Right, cheers pal." One of the nice things about
improvising this video is that I’ve seen things
as they actually were, not as the PR teams
would want them to be. Anyway, this toll. It made sense
when the bridge was built. "For every Carriage drawn or propelled by
Steam or any Means other than Animal Power, "Two Shillings and Sixpence". Back then, that was worth collecting,
adjusted for inflation, that'd be about £15. But the law did not mention inflation. The company could choose to
waive the tolls at any time, they did that during the
Covid lockdown last year, and I guess they're doing that
one way now. But if you stop collecting tolls
for the long term, it's a lot more difficult
to bring them back. And they'd still be required
to maintain the bridge. If there's one car in each direction
every 30 seconds on average, and looking at that, yeah, there is: well, that's still about a quarter
million pounds of revenue every year. So you'll see people talk about
story of old quirky British laws that mean you still have these ferries,
and you still that toll bridge, oh, and they must be maintained by law, and isn't it weird what happens
in rural Britain? But I don't think the law is the
reason those crossings are still there. Because there are two ways you could
interpret "whenever required" in those old legal documents.
"Whenever required" could mean: whenever anyone asks for it. If someone turns up, any hour of any day,
the ferry must be there waiting for them. It's a valid interpretation, but that's not
how those words been read through history. And it's not how they're being read now. The Hulmes ferry only runs for a few hours,
three or four days a week, and never in winter. And it stopped running for
a year back in 2010, it took a campaign and local effort
to get it reinstated. As for the Thelwall Ferry,
it runs most days, but only for a few hours. And apparently not when the water’s low? Remember I said my was
logged and counted? Well, you can also interpret
"whenever required" to mean "if there is reasonable demand". There's an unofficial web site
for the Hulmes ferry, and it says: "use it or lose it". Those old laws mention other ferries.
They've all gone. I don't know if they were removed
through legal process or just forgotten about, because ultimately:
no-one's complaining. And if someone did complain, who in
government is going to take action about a ferry that
almost no-one uses? I think these ferries,
and the 12 pence toll, have stuck around because
it would be more effort for the giant corporation
to try and stop them. It's a minor thing for a
multi-billion-pound company to pay for a couple of ferry-boats, compared to having to deal with
angry locals and bad press. And I think the toll on that bridge
has stayed at 12 pence for so long because increasing it would have
required a change in the law, and trying to get that is way more
time-consuming and expensive than just keeping things as they are.
In our own lives, we all make do with a lot of small
bothersome things and irritations because it's less work than
trying to fix them. Different scale, same principle. Although I'm not saying the ferries
are a bothersome thing, I think they're brilliant, I think we should have more
quirky useful things funded by multi-billion-dollar corporations. I'm just saying that the company has
many bigger things to deal with. If they wanted to, they could probably
get away without the ferries. And at a guess… I reckon it's not
worth the hassle of not running them. But one thing is changing soon. That bridge needs expensive refurbishment,
maybe even replacement soon. Which means that the company
has noticed it, and suddenly changing the law might be
worth their time. There was a consultation process
for the locals last month. The company would like to raise
the toll up to a whole... ...one pound. And replace the ticket booths
with automatic systems. So if you do want the novelty
of the 12 pence toll... now's the time to go. Because the law will probably
change quite soon. As for the ferries... I do hope that
the locals will make sure that removing them never becomes
the easy option.
Im from Estonia so in theory i should not give a damn about river crossings in the UK, but like most other Tom's videos, you start - you watch until the end!
I'm originally from Warrington where the Thelwall Ferry is and the Warburton Toll
The Thelwall Ferry (it's pronounced Thell-wall, Tom) is one of the strange quirky things we have that I never used. There's a great cycle path along the Ship Canal and I've passed the ferry hundreds of times, but never had to use it. In fact, despite spending my first 30 years of life in Warrington and having friends and relatives who live less then a mile from it, I don't know anyone who has ever used it. But....it IS used, quite a lot. Many a time have I seen people on it as I've ridden past.
It's one of those quaint, historic things we just have. And it's nice.
The Warburton Bridge on the other hand is a massive pain in the arse. Traffic james at peak times and completely pointless.
Peel Holdings aren't too popular with many people in the area. They are responsible for the bridges that cross the river such as my old local bridge, the Stockton Heath Swing Bridge - https://www.warrington.gov.uk/swingbridges
They all need re-painting, the swing bridge often sticks in hot weather and causes complete traffic mayhem. Despite many local grumblings to Peel, nothing ever seems to get done.
What do they do at the bridge if you don't have any cash?
I was once driving around Southampton and took a wrong turn onto the Itchen Bridge. I had no cash, and at the time they did not take any other form of payment. It was a 50p toll, for which the toll collector held up the traffic behind me for 5 straight minutes while she took down my information. I received a bill in the mail for the toll a few weeks later, in which they charged me....50p. No fine, no penalty. I sent them a cheque to pay it.
How much money, and time, was wasted in collecting that toll? All the people behind me that lost time, the admin hours and paper to send me the bill, someone would have cash the cheque.
Or...she could have winked and said "just this once", and waved me through in 10 seconds.
Fast forward about 10 years, and I live in NYC now. Wife and I took our first trip out to Pennsylvania, and on the way back realize we don't have cash to pay for the Lincoln Tunnel. It's about $16, I think, but they don't take cards, either. They write us up again, and we get a bill for $50. Our fault, we deserved the fine, and it made sense to cover the admin costs.
12p, though...generating 250k a year. You can pay a couple of toll collectors a decent wage and still have a good chunk of change left for minor annual bridge maintenance. Or just forget it and let road tax cover it?
I feel like I know more obscure information about The UK because of Tom Scott than anything actually useful about my own country. What a national treasure he is!