What's left of The Sankey - England's Oldest Industrial Canal

[Music] [Music] hello again everybody and welcome back to another beautiful sunny day in the north of england today i'm in saint helens the wonderful town of saint helens and i'm looking at this this is the sankey canal order sent helen's canal and it claims to be the oldest industrial age canal in england older than the bridgewater canal um but it's not all here anymore unlike the bridge water it's not all in water a lot of it's disappeared a lot of it's just completely been built over so what i want to do today is follow it from end to end from where it started uh in saint helens here all the way down to witness um and taking some of that history learn some of that history but also see what's left see what's left of this wonderful uh industrial age canal the sankey canal was opened in the 1750s when it's becoming quite common for rivers around the country to be made navigable for large cargo boats thus opening up faster transport links for industry and trade the original proposal was to make the largest waterway in the area the little sankey brook navigable for boats traveling from saint helens down to the river mersey initially it was a straightforward application to widen and deepen the brook but in the end became a completely separate canal along most of its length the grandmother of all industrial canals opened in 1757 the canal was built so that coal from the hay.collieries could be transported to liverpool via the mersey the canal also carried a lot of iron ore and corn the engineers behind the sankey canal were henry berry and william taylor berry had previously worked on the newry canal between loch knee and the irish sea a whole 15 years before the northern irish one technically the oldest canal in the british isles when it came to the sankey the plan had its start just to the east of saint helens and somewhere called broad oak an arc down to here where it entered the mersey three short branches were also part of the parliamentary petition here at blackbrook here at gerard's bridge and here at ravenhead and the canal was extended later to fiddler's ferry and then witness which i'll get to later on for now though i want to look at the first half of the canal from saint helens to warrington to follow its course and see what's left of it today so saint helens was full of glass works plate glasswork vast uh taking up vast areas next to the canal and in the city in the town centre um and this part of the canal as you can see is still fed with water it's still water being discharged into this bit now this bit of the canal was known as the hotties because of all the hot water being discharged from the industrial works around here the furthest point the canal ever reached was at the end of the raven head branch here at the bottom of what is today canal street and next to the sheet glass works today pilkington's factory he then turned eastwards where the shopping center is and ran for a short period around the town centre where today it's still in water the world of glass museum here celebrates the town's glass-blowing heritage now it's hard to tell at the moment but just there was a small branch arm of the canal called the sutton arm and it went just a short distance directly southwards to some coal pits if i swing about this way where the geese are you might be able to see this bridge in the background this is a new bridge this canal was built with mersey flat boats in mind so mersey flats had very very tall sails remember this is the 18th century the mid-18th century so very very tall sailed bolts so all the bridges which crossed it uh were built as swing bridges to get out the way these boats um this one is a new fairly new um bridge and it doesn't swing because the council or whoever built this bridge didn't have the foresight to think that maybe if this was going to be opened up again as the canal and restored properly that boats wouldn't be able to get under there you'd need another swing bridge so if you're going to open this up that's the first obstacle you have to knock that bridge down anyway uh let's crack on and let's get to the um the new old locks the new double locks today saint helens is famous for several things this is rugby land of course but it was also a national important center for glass production as well as a regionally important center for coal mining the canal helps the town grow massively and with each new road built to accommodate this expansion swing bridges had to be installed across the canal and when the railways came some 80 years later they also had to cross using swim bridges today large parts of the canal are still in water but cut off by infilled sections this bridge here was originally just flat beamed the arch is built later to strengthen the bridge this whole restored section of canal ends at this point where another swing bridge would have been [Music] right so this is the new double lock and it was built in 1770 and it's the new double lock because there was an old double lock already in place further down the canal this new double lock took the canal up into the town centre of saint helens so now i'm i'm leaving the town center if i keep following it this way so what is a double lock well a double lock is two locks side by side to actually share a lot of gate in the middle this one here so that the water directly um goes from one chamber into the next without any sort of uh breaking in in the middle there um so this one is the newer one 1770 though still it's quite old uh whereas the older one is further along we'll see that later so these were some of the first um multi-use uh multi sequential locks um on canals anywhere um so yes so this lock was restored in the late 80s early 90s um not that you can tell today uh it's not very it's not fair very well in the last 30 years um but yes it's uh it's worth having a look at let's see what we can see right so because this lock was restored um a lot of what you can see now is is from the late 80s early 90s the brickwork over there and the lock itself it's pretty much useless it's just full of rubbish um but if we walk up here a bit further up you can see um past the old gate here um you can see some of the original stonework over there but don't fall in um some of the original stonework over there that open out into this small basin just over here which is all overgrown and swampy um but yeah it wouldn't take much to restore this canal um in this section where i am now town center is a bit more tricky but it's a bit of a section now yeah won't take much to do it properly [Music] right so just below the locks you come to this t-junction which is just here the locks are that way the town center's that way so it came down here and then you've got this line this behind me is a line of a branch arm that went west for a quarter of a mile or so to a small basin not very significant the rest of the canal went in this direction which is what i'll be following now now it looks the water's flowing in here it looks like a natural brook an actual waterway that's because it kind of it's kind of been reclaimed a little bit as it's been infilled and as it's kind of lost its canalness its canal identity it has become a bit of a natural waterway so the water is flowing quickly down this bit here so as you can see you can't go down this footpath um because the repair in it but if i go over here near the fence you might be able to hear down that grid water flowing now that is the actual brook now the brook and the canal kind of ran next to each other for a bit the brook went under the canal um and wiggled on that side over there for a bit off and on at the surface the canal dominated the valley really but the brook still is underground and it still goes under here um it's just some of it seeps into the canal here and we get this movement of water so it's kind of half canal half brook at the moment this bit the rainforest flowed into the sankey brook which is the first time on the journey that we actually come close to the brook the canal is named after today the canal actually disappears beneath roads and this playing field [Applause] right so we lost the canal a bit there because of all the road and the the buildings and the school and stuff but now we've come to this rugby club and the line of the canal actually came where them people are in a straight line over to where you can see that bridge there so the line of the canal has completely been lost um here but you can still walk along it if you like so the canal came down here and then it went that way and to this this is the old double lock which i mentioned before but it also went this way this is a branch line which heads for a little way to the north the black brook branch we're going to follow that now to a little basin at the end and see what we can find [Music] the black brook branch came to this wharf here where a mineral railway from the colliery came to meet it there was also a small selecting mill in the area built in 1773 [Music] and so we're coming last to the old double locks that all double ups as opposed to the new double locks we saw earlier now this set was built in 1756 so about 13 or 14 years before the new double locks now with the sankey canal being the oldest industrial age canal in in england um this of course is the first ever lock staircase in england the first ever lock staircase in england two chambers a double chamber like before two chambers separated sharing a gate in the middle and now of course there are there are industrial age canals in france before they were in england so it's not the first lock staircase in the world but it is the first one in england that's just wonderful apogee is not here anymore it's been replaced by this cascading water feature which is a bit of a shame it would have been nice to see it preserved but yeah very important feature on the canal there was a railway spring swing bridge on the top lock up there and then a pedestrian swing bridge lower down as well but they both gone as well but yeah wonderful the line of the canal now follows side by side with a brook past the large park colliery and through open countryside to newton willows [Music] [Music] now the nearby bridgewater canal is often cited as the first of the industrial age in mainland britain because it follows no natural water courses and is definitely an artificial channel from end to end the sankey was built with the aim of making the brook navigable for boats and so loses the distinction of being a separate canal but it is a separate canal almost its entire length running separate to the natural water cough and though today the waters are both intermingle here and there there's still no doubt that the sankey is a true canal the first in britain [Music] right so the sankey brookie's down there and that is kind of a flooded field over there beautiful sunshine but look at that over there that high banking hmm i wonder what that could be i think we'll find out very soon right so now i'm outside newton willows and this is newton common locks and it's one of the original locks on the canal built in 1775 this is actually a reconstruction it was um rebuilt in 1889 this is what you're looking at now the footprint of the 1889 rebuild um but of course it's not here anymore it's been in filled so the last barges came through here in about 1919 and then it fell into dereliction and was neglected and abandoned and in the 1970s the council filled it in and left what we see today um so yes but this is still one of the the first locks on one of the first canals in britain so um it's just just there these footprints tantalizing that it remains like this but it's just not in water [Music] and so we've come at last to the sankey viaducts this mighty construction behind me built in 1830 to carry the liverpool to manchester railway across this valley across the sankey brook and across the sankey canal which this path here follows the line of so the canal went that way under that archway there the brook is over there uh just in the undergrowth over there now the the violets was built um in an architectural style drawing on canal aqueducts because that was the available technology at the time that's all people knew and george stevenson decided to build a viaduct here instead of what other options i don't know what other options he would have had but he decided to go for the viaduct um because of the mersey flat boats which i mentioned before with a huge tall sails needed to keep going down the canal and so we needed that clearance of the railway line crossing those sailboats so that is why it's high up there 20 odd meters above the ground um yes making this the world's first railway viaduct amazing the world's first railway viaduct crossing the england's first industrial age canal quite a significant point now of course this viaduct is still in use it's still the liverpool manchester railway is still the liverpool to manchester railway and it's still in use you might even see a train go past in the background while waffling on a little bit killing time but uh yes it's still in use and the trains today are much heavier than the the trains it was built for in 1830 so it just goes to show the design the um ingenuity uh the ingenious um engineering behind it all george stevenson's uh amazing thank you viados still propping up the railway today and still doing it in a fantastic way as well [Music] [Music] a short distance south of the viaduct the canal is back in water soon enough though the canal disappears again by these fields its lines still traced by the footpath i'm following then there's some sad remains of win-wick luck left remaining rotting away year by year in the shadow of the motorway next is winwick key which was once a hive of canal activity a large maintenance yard contained a wood and metal workshop where key parts of the canal infrastructure were made including timber bridges gates and parts of the boats at the iron forge the building here today is from the 1840s there's also a large crane here lifting boats from the yard and into the canal and a small railway bringing coal this was also a good spot for horses to rest and recuperate as they hauled the boats along the canal there was also a dry dock here which could be drained for boats to be repaired further down is the remains of hume lock [Music] and the remains of the lock keepers cottage which was excavated and restored a little though today is quite overgrown [Music] looking at the foundations of the old cottage it's easy to imagine what this place would have been like in the deep dark winter cold with a fire on the half and a pot of boiling water on the stove long before the motorway and the arrival of this big industrial estate this was bleak open country in the middle of the two towns just beyond the lock the brook crosses beneath the canal and a sluice gate remains which was opened to prevent flooding however ironically i couldn't get anywhere near it because the whole area itself had become deluged with flood water thanks to heavy recent rains so as the canal and brook wind their way through warrington town we've still got a long way to go until we discover its original end down here where the brook met the river mersey at sankey bridges but we'll pick that up in the next video and continue to follow the canal along its final two extensions all the way to fiddler's ferry and then witness thanks so much for watching everybody and i'll see you in the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music] this [Music] mmm [Music] um

Channel: Bee Here Now

Views: 47,486

Keywords: history of manchester, manchester history, british history, working class, industrial revolution, martin zero, abandoned, railway history, urbex, historic railways, northern history, liverpool history, liverpool, north mersey, mersey docks, liverpool docks, abandoned railway, decaying, sankey canal, industrial canals, lancashire, st helens, warrington, widnes, fiddlers ferry, sankey viaduct, sankey, lock staircase, canal locks

Id: GI1ImAToRGY

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021