Two Museums celebrate England’s Canal Heritage

England is an island nation, surrounded by seas that enabled trade with nations around the world—but it took an era of engineering works to link together its internal waters with canals, allowing commerce to cross the nation without sailing around its coasts.

Last fall, I visited two museums in two cities explaining and exploring the heritage of England’s canal systems. Each, one in London and one in Gloucester, tells a different part of the story, but the map above is a summary of what we’re talking about: a series of canals, built mostly in the late 18th century, that linked together the country’s great rivers—especially the Thames, Severn, Mersey and Trent.

At the London Canal Museum, located on a canal basin near Kings Cross, the focus is on the canals in the London area, but it starts with a general discussion, including a map of the system and an explanation of how canals use locks to cross hills and valleys.

One of the biggest exhibits is a canal boat, out of the water, that shows the small spaces in which boatmen and their families lived as the boats carried goods—especially coal—between the Midlands and London, often living aboard for years.

In the beginning, the barges were pulled along the canals by horses, mules or donkeys on towpaths; in cities, they were sometimes stabled above canalside warehouses with ramps for them to reach their quarters. By the early 20th-century, tractors—originally adapted from farm tractors—were used. As well, many boats, especially on long rural stretches used small steam engines.

The museum explores different aspects: The workings of locks, the work needed to keep canals supplied with water, charities that supported boatmen and tried to provide some education for their families and the history of the narrowboat itself. That last was the result of agreements among canal builders: 70 feet long, 7 feet wide allowed boats to pass, two together, through the locks. The uniform size meant boats could go anywhere and there was no need to reload cargoes.

The London museum puts a lot of emphasis on the canals within London, especially the Regent’s Canal, built in the early 1800s to meet the Grand Union Canal at London’s western edge and provide a bypass around the city to meet the Thames east of the docks at Limehouse.

But, the story is not all beer and skittles. While canal companies and later their railroad cohorts and competitors made sizable profits, most boat families did not; occasionally there were struggles over pay and working conditions; this 1895 Birmingham protest gave a double meaning to ‘frozen out.’ When the canals were frozen and nothing moved, boatmen received no pay.

Freezing played a big role again later. All through the 20th century, trucks took more and more of the freight business, and the long freeze in the winter of 1963 put a final end to nearly all barge traffic, especially in the London area. It didn’t take long without maintenance for canalside warehouses to be abandoned, for towpaths to deteriorate and for rubbish to accumulate in the waters.

Fortunately for us all, a campaign to save the canals grew, and voluntary organizations pushed to save the system. British Waterways, the public corporation that had replaced all the private canal operators, proposed a kind of reverse of that process; in 2012, British Waterways was replaced by a voluntary charitable operator, the Canal & River Trust, which now manages 2,000 miles of canals and rivers, along with docks, marinas, museums, archives and historic buildings.

That list includes both the London Canal Museum, and the Gloucester Waterways Museum, also known as the National Waterways Museum, at the Gloucester Docks on the Severn River, an area now split between the museum and modern apartments occupying the former tall warehouses where cargo passed between ocean-going vessels on the river and narrowboats headed east and north by canal.

Naturally, the Gloucester museum focuses on stories and history of Gloucester and the Severn, including an extensive industry that built boats for both the river and canal trade.

Unloading and loading at the Gloucester Docks…

And reminders that there was danger along the way, as well. Instructions are for the use of a flare pistol adapted to shooting a lifeline as much as 300 yards between ships or between ship and shore. The grim story of the drag hooks, available on every canal bridge, is that their main use was retrieving bodies from the canal—often errant sheep or cows, but all to often humans.

On a brighter note, a play-and-learn area for children is tucked in a corner, surrounded by the museum’s extensive collection of maritime machinery.

Outdoors, the exhibits continue with a variety of boats, including this Dutch-built dredge and a number of other boats… and a reminder of geography and trade.

Nuts and Bolts

London Canal Museum 

• Open Tuesdays-Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays, 10:00 to 16:30
• Admission: Adults £7.50, Child £3.75, Family £16, Concession £6
• The museum also offers a variety of boat trips; more information HERE
• Kings Cross and Paddington are about 12 minutes walk away, but several buses stop at the museum’s corner

Gloucester Waterways Museum 

• Open Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10:00 to 16:00
• Admission: Adults £10, Child 5-15 £6.36, Family £25, Concession £9
• The Gloucester Docks Activity Hub has a variety of programs including canal walks and paddling; more information HERE
• An easy walk from the center of Gloucester; paid parking available on site.