Canals and narrowboats

Canals and narrowboats

In the podcast about Mr Speaker, I told you that I was going on holiday. I said that I would be the captain of a ship and sail away to new and interesting places. So, where did I go on my ship? Perhaps I sailed across the Atlantic. Perhaps I visited the islands of Greece.

But, no. Actually, my wife and I hired a canal boat and we went for a holiday on one of Britain’s beautiful canals.

We have lots of canals in Britain, especially in England. Most of them were built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Boats on the canals carried coal, iron, pottery, stone, lime, salt and many other goods needed by the new industries which grew during the Industrial Revolution. Until the railways came, the canals were one of the most important forms of transport in the country.

The centre of the canal system in England is here in Birmingham, where I live. We like to tell visitors that there are more canals in Birmingham than in Venice! ( This is true, but the canals in Venice are probably more beautiful!)

Originally, horses pulled the boats on the canals. The horses walked along a path at the side of the canal. Do you know the English verb“ to tow”? It means to pull something which cannot move by itself. If your car breaks down, you may need to use another vehicle to tow the car to a garage. So, the horses towed the boats along the canal, and we still call the path beside a canal a“ towpath”. In the19 th century, however, some canal boats had steam engines instead of horses, and today, most canal boats have diesel engines.

Compared to the great canals of the Netherlands or Germany, English canals and canal boats are tiny. The traditional boats of the English canals are only about2 meters wide and between10 and20 meters long. A bigger boat could not fit through the bridges or the locks. We call these boats“ narrowboats”. Why are they so small? Well, the canals are narrow, because it was cheaper and easier to build a narrow canal than a wide canal. And the boats are small because, originally, they were towed by a single horse. Traditional English narrowboats are brightly painted in red, blue, green or yellow, or all of these colours. Often they are decorated with pictures of flowers or castles.

When the railways arrived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the canals began to decline. It was much quicker to move goods on a railway than on a canal. And in the20 th century, road vehicles took traffic from the canals as well.

Here is a typical story about the decline of the canals. There was a company with a factory which made feed for animals. It was beside a canal, and the company had11 narrowboats which brought grain and other things which it needed from a sea port. The narrowboats took3 or4 days to make the journey from the factory to the sea port and back. In1923, the company bought a lorry. The lorry could make two return journeys each day. Naturally, the company scrapped the narrowboats and used the lorry instead.

And so, everyone thought, that is the end of the old canals. The narrowboats disappeared, many canals were abandoned, weeds grew in the water so that boats could not pass, the towpaths collapsed into the canals, the locks would not work any more. It was all very sad.

Then, shortly after the Second World War, people started to think that the canals could have a new use, for recreation i. e. for leisure and holidays. They saw that many canals went through beautiful, quiet countryside, where people could relax and enjoy nature. Gradually, people started to use the canals again. Abandoned canals were cleaned and re- opened; locks were repaired; and in one or two places new canals were built. Today, you can see large numbers of brightly- painted traditional narrowboats on our canals again. But they are carrying holiday- makers, not coal, or lime or pottery.

There will be more about canal boats in the next podcast. There is a quiz on the Listen to English website so that you can test how well you have understood what I have said.