A watery palimpsest

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Sep 17th 2008
From Economist.com

Admiring what remains of an antique network


Tuesday | Wednesday



Tuesday
GONGOOZLER: not an obscure variety of coelacanth, nor a visitor to one too many pubs, but a person who enjoys observing British canals—a trainspotter of still waters. Mostly this involves sitting outside waterside pubs watching narrowboats go by, occasionally helping (whether invited to or not) with lock-opening activities and the like.

The charm of canals lies in their survival in the face of irrelevance. Once, Britain’s inland waterway system ran for around 4,000 miles, facilitating the early industrial revolution. Railways began their decline, lorries and declining coal use completed it.

Today, thanks mainly to gongoozlers’ passion, 2,000 miles or so survive; the rest have been paved over or filled in. With industrial traffic gone, they have been transformed to avenues of leisure and houseboats. Thousands of narrowboats ply the waterways (at around four miles-per-hour), traversing a lock system unchanged since the Victorian age. Pausing alongside a busy lock on a Sunday stroll and watching the boats line up, enter the hatch, open the sluices and ascend or descend, evokes a dynamic sense of past, sustained into the present.

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Such charms help canals to survive. In Birmingham, the Midlands heartland of the system, waterside development fuels urban regeneration. The heart of Manchester’s lively gay community lies canalside. Yet trendy urban lofts looming over shabby diesel-sputtering narrowboats can provoke awkward tension. Many enthusiasts accuse British Waterways, the government agency responsible for the network, of being more concerned with property development than with maintaining locks and towpaths.

Yet when government subsidy and volunteer effort alone keep canals alive, can one blame the agency in charge with finding a way to squeeze a little economic value from canals? Visionary pointy-heads occasionally tout the canal as the answer to freight congestion on British roads. Such possibilities exist (in the shifting of waste, for example) but these are typically over-egged. A 2,000-mile network that relies on narrowboats travelling at four miles per hour, will never seriously challenge the motorways.

The canals merit subsidy in the same way as village greens or urban parks. London canals are about urban life, and escape from it. The face of the city presented along the towpaths is very different to that seen from a double-decker, or at street level; it gazes into the city’s backyard and its past.

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My gongoozling mystifies some, such as a Midlands-raised colleague, whose morning trudge to school took her across the shopping-trolley-strewn Coventry Canal. I now live alongside a canal, in Peckham, but there’s a catch: my canal no longer exists. The Grand Surrey Canal, completed in 1811, was intended to link the Thames at Rotherhithe with Surrey, but only made it as far as Peckham. It became derelict and filthy; in the 1970s it was, alas, filled in. Hindsight is wonderful: from the walkway to my flat, I gaze out at the back end of a superstore atop the old waterway, and mourn for it.

But enough of its spirit survives to whet my appetite. A tree-lined walkway to Peckham’s centre traces part of the old canal route, passing beneath cast-iron-arched bridges grandly laden with Victorian insignia, whose supports still bear the scrapes of the ropes with which carthorses pulled timber-laden barges along the canal. Nothing else in the area provides quite so sad and vivid a glimpse of its past.

Londoners to the north, west and east are luckier; there, before connecting with the routes to far further on, the network of the Grand Union, Regent and Hertford Union canals and the River Lee Navigation winds through neighbourhoods genteel in the west, to the east London badlands, even taking in aqueducts to rival those built by the Romans.

More tension here: these towpaths are narrow, and stroller and cyclist co-exist uneasily. And in the regenerated Docklands and “Olympic boroughs” of east London, among the snazzy new developments and developments-to-come, the canal as public space is under challenge, hemmed in at all sides, the towpath a trenchline. It’s a battle worth fighting: whatever the neighbourhood, whether leafy-residential, or industrial-grim, a stroll alongside a London canal is a rare chance for uninterrupted contemplation in this town: going nowhere, slowly. Gongoozling, even.

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Wednesday
REGENT’S CANAL, built over eight years in the early 19th century to link London with the Midlands, has been reinvented as a desirable strolling route and real-estate backdrop. Trade no longer plies the canal, but boats abound: sightseeing cruisers packed with bemused tourists and excited schoolchildren heading to London’s zoo, and houseboats from the many communities along the country’s canal network.

From Little Venice to Camden, the colourful moorings of permanent narrowboat communities have a twee, villagey feel, with plots of flowers and even garden gnomes. Through Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, the walk is draped in green; opposite the towpath, grand mansions and landscaped terraces cascade down (the Sultan of Brunei will probably not wave from his window). At Camden Lock Market, slumming teens smoke joints in front of stalls selling cheap hippie trash.

Conrad Heine

A floating villagePast Camden the canal heads into the railway lands—down to St Pancras, home since 2007 of the new Eurostar terminus, and King’s Cross—before disappearing into the 960-yard-long (870m) Islington Tunnel. Leafy suburbia gives way to council estates; the backdrop is more industrial. Sweeping arches of cathedral-like stations and delicate ironwork of gas lamps etch the Victorian age onto a cinematic skyline. Boats flock to St Pancras Basin for maintenance in a British Waterways workshop.

But this elegant desolation is temporary: the Eurostar opened the development floodgates; glitzy new shopping and housing developments will follow. The train has already transformed St Pancras station and the streets around it: the hookers are gone, and Victorian scenes will not be shot here again.

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Over the hill from King’s Cross into Islington, Hackney and Docklands alongside the Thames, the East End is in the air, even with the docks long gone. Along the towpaths, strollers are still abundant, but so are a more aggressive breed of cyclist and walkers of dogs that seem more jaws-on-legs than animal.

The east has been booming since the 1990s. On Kingsland Road and Broadway Market, delis and cafés are gradually edging out the East End high street of old. This chic remains shabby, in affectation if not property value: at Acton Lock on a sunny Sunday, Hoxtonites with asymmetrical haircuts are barbecuing.

Gated waterside communities predominate on the canal’s south side, but on the other public space remains the defiant ideal, and council estates are ubiquitous. Victoria Park, where Regent’s Canal meets Hertford Union Canal, is as grand as Regent’s Park, but could not be more different, in history or present bearing. Regent’s retains its air of aristocratic refinement, but Victoria was built to give the East End a lung, and it remains a community green. Here, the moorings are temporary, and the residential narrowboats (“continuous cruisers”, in the jargon) are scruffier than the west-London variety.

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At Old Ford Lock, where the Hertford Union joins the River Lee Navigation, the London gongoozler finds a natural habitat. Fishing lines dangle: for what exactly? It doesn’t matter: the social fishermen, another fixture in these parts, are more concerned with cider, and a day at the canal, than catch-of-the-day.

Leaving Hertford Union and following the Lee, which runs north-east into Hertfordshire, village ambience disappears. The skies expand; marshlands, warehouses and crumbling factories dominate the skyline, reminding strollers that London was, and no longer is a city of maritime commerce. Nature is taking over, wrapping its tendrils around skeletons of industry. That too may prove temporary: backers of the London Olympics have promised to “regenerate” the Lee Valley.

The canal has a role: as part of the plans, on the silted-up Bow Back River, a new lock has been built to force the water level up and open a new channel that allows barges, rather than trucks, to service the construction of the site. The plan’s backers claim this will open up the waterways beyond the games. If London’s canals have a working future, perhaps it starts here.