Engineering Canals: The Making of a Nation

This is the story of how canals changed and shaped our modern world.

Carrying huge volumes of goods and fuel,

they were a stimulus to Britain's great Industrial Revolution.

But they also gave us much more

and their legacy lives on, often in surprising ways.

I'm Liz McIver.

I've spent my life studying and talking about history.

I believe it's time to take a different look

at our inland waterways.

Connecting the industrial powerhouses of Yorkshire

and Lancashire meant driving through the Pennines,

a huge obstacle with difficult geography and climate.

Would men with a fledging knowledge of engineering be able to

conquer the unforgiving terrain and fickle weather?

Whose reputations would be enhanced and whose would crumble?

And how did their pioneering work

give rise to a new discipline - civil engineering?

Welcome to the Pennines, the backbone of England -

in places 2,000 feet high -

a rugged and almost inaccessible natural barrier.

To build a canal here would take imagination and brute strength.

But the prize was enormous.

A trade link between Yorkshire and Lancashire,

an industrial corridor between Leeds and Liverpool.

If the canal could be built, it would enable the wool merchants

of Bradford, Wakefield and Leeds

to send their products across the Pennines to Liverpool

and beyond to the British Empire.

In the west, traders in Liverpool could transport imported

American cotton to the mill towns of Lancashire

and, in the middle, a giant coalfield would provide the fuel

for the Industrial Revolution.

If there was an imperative to improve communication

in the late 18th century, it was this - the state of the roads.

They were unpaved and unpassable in some places.

This is Eastergate Packhorse Bridge

on a track known as Rapes Highway, linking Colne Valley to Rochdale.

Travel on these roads would have been hazardous at the best of times.

Only small amounts of merchandise could be moved at one time

and the cost was prohibitive.

It was as cheap to carry freight on a ship from Portugal

as it was to take it a few hundred miles by road across England.

Everyone agreed that a trans-Pennine canal would be the ideal solution.

In a move destined to make life tricky,

two committees were set up, one in Yorkshire, the other in Lancashire.

The Yorkshire side was much keener than Lancashire to press on.

The cities of Bradford, Wakefield

and Leeds were well established as woollen centres.

They wanted the quickest route across the hills to Liverpool

and the international markets beyond.

Their option would run from Leeds north to Skipton,

west towards Preston and south into Liverpool.

They knew a canal was a long-term project that would help

businesses grow as it developed.

But they had a much more urgent problem,

which the canal could resolve quickly.

This is what it was all about, limestone.

This is the reason that

so many canals were built in the north of England.

You might wonder, "Why do we need lime?"

And it was burnt using coal to make a fertiliser for improving the land.

Lime kilns were used to burn the rock at about 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Quarries near Bradford were running out of limestone,

but fresh supplies had been found further north near Skipton.

The canal would be the ideal way of transporting it.

The Yorkshire industrialists wanted work to start at their end.

Asking two committees, each with a vested interest,

to decide on a route was never going to be smooth.

Predictably, the Liverpool backers weren't interested

in going as far north as Preston or in limestone.

They wanted coal.

As Yorkshire mulled over its preferred route,

Liverpool produced an alternative.

It would take the canal through Wigan

and the Lancashire coalfield, then onto the market towns

of Blackburn and Burnley, that we're just starting to expand.

Both committees realised someone would have to make an expert

and independent judgment on the two routes,

so they called in the best-known engineer of his time,

James Brindley.

Brindley was no academic.

He couldn't spell and his writings were almost illegible.

But he was a born engineer,

with a curious mind, a pile of common sense

and a willingness to experiment.

He is widely credited as the designer of the Bridgewater,

often regarded as the first modern canal in Britain.

In the late 18th century, if you used the term engineer,

people would have assumed you meant a soldier

because engineering was the preserve of the military.

James Brindley was in the vanguard of a new breed of self-educated men

who had started to develop civilian engineering.

The engineers were defining their profession,

firstly because they worked for a daily fee

rather than for the work which was actually done.

They were the equals in the professional sense

of the people who employed them,

whereas previously engineers

tended to be the servants of those who employed them.

And they prepared designs and specifications for other

people to do the work according to the designs which they had made.

Brindley had to overcome a fundamental challenge -

how to keep canals watertight.

The answer he came up with,

and for some it was his greatest achievement, was puddling,

a technique for lining the base of the canal with impervious clay.

This is a puddle clay out of the quarry as dug

and this is to go on a firm base at the bottom of the canal.

And it's got to be trampled in as so.

-And when you get to the wetter stuff...

-Oh, right.

..when you've wetted it down, it goes together that much better.

-Yes, I can feel the difference already.

-And that seals it off.

-Gosh, it's really hard work, isn't it?

-Yes.

That's the reason they use sheep or cattle to do it on larger areas

but man has to do it on small, narrow areas.

And puddle clay is a perfect clay that doesn't break up in water,

so you can build on it.

You can build the banks,

the bottom, it'll never leak.

It's so fine, but it's the only clay that doesn't break up in water,

so it has to be puddle clay up to spec.

Brindley arbitrated between Lancashire and Yorkshire

and selected what he believed was the best route for the canal.

It would follow Yorkshire's northern line because it was cheaper.

To appease the Liverpool wishes,

a spur would connect the coalfields around Wigan.

It finally ended the friction between the two counties.

Both sides agreed in 1770 that work should start

simultaneously at both ends.

In designing canals, Brindley knew that following the contours

of the land would make for easier construction.

It avoided the need for difficult and expensive tunnels,

embankments and locks.

James Brindley favoured the contour method, basically,

because he didn't have to worry about locks.

And every time a lock was used, there'd be water used

and with any lock, any canal, really speaking,

one of the biggest problems is maintaining a supply of water.

So you need to keep as much water in the canal as possible

and he did that by following the contour, and not by using locks.

The contouring is evident at Greenberfield,

as Brindley curved the canal around the lie of the land.

It's a very elegant engineering solution and today

we can appreciate how it enhances the beauty of the landscape.

But all this meandering added time to the journey

and contouring couldn't solve all the problems in trying to

cross England's highest range of hills.

At some point, you had to tackle the typography head-on.

Between Bradford and Keighley, there were two major problems facing

the canal builders.

The first, at Dowley Gap, was how to cross the River Aire

carrying water off the central Pennines.

Brindley designed an aqueduct with seven arches.

It's the biggest structure on the canal

and spans the Aire 30 feet below.

The aqueduct was built by stonemasons

and navvies wielding only picks, shovels, buckets and wheelbarrows.

Brindley died before it opened in 1773.

The second problem with the terrain was at Bingley.

With Brindley's death, it fell on the shoulders of a young

engineer from Halifax called John Longbotham

and it was Longbotham who came up with one of the most

spectacular engineering solutions in canal history.

At Bingley, the canal had to rise a total of 90 feet.

Longbotham designed a system that would allow boats to be

raised or lowered in separate stages.

They are the steepest staircase locks in the UK

with a gradient of about one in five.

It also boasts the tallest lock gates in the country,

but it's a complicated and not very efficient system.

It takes about an hour for a boat to pass through.

They are really an example of the old-fashioned

type of engineering that was used in the early part of the 18th century.

After they had constructed them, they realised there were problems

because the amount of water you can use.

You can hear it pouring down now.

They are quite inefficient.

And so, very, very quickly, they had to go on and develop better ways

of using them and they built single locks instead.

The canal's engineers were taking on the landscape and winning,

but they knew that getting the route across a gentle hill would be

relatively simple.

As they progressed west into Lancashire,

and higher into the hills, much bigger challenges would await.

This is Foulridge, the summit of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal,

nearly 500 feet above sea level.

It's a peaceful and beautiful place within sight of the moorland

that so inspired the Bronte sisters.

But two centuries ago the noise here would have been deafening,

bustling with navvies hammering rocks, horses pulling carts

and explosions going off in the hills.

Again, the Pennine geography was making life

difficult for the engineers.

Here, plans for locks were abandoned in favour of a much more

ambitious structure -

a tunnel stretching almost a mile.

Foulridge would become the single most expensive

part of the entire construction project.

The engineer, Robert Whitworth, had worked as a surveyor

and draughtsman for Brindley's organisation.

The technique Whitworth employed became known as "cut and cover"

and is still in use today.

Cut and cover was actually used about 4,000 years ago in Babylon,

where they use exactly the same technique of digging a trench,

building a brickwork arch, although it was made of different materials,

and then cover it up with earth.

Cut and cover consists of a big trench that you

dig in the ground, then you build your lining,

your tunnel lining, which normally has a circular or arch shape,

and then you fill it up with the ground that you've excavated

previously, so you leave the ground surface as if nothing happened.

They had to be really careful

and control the way they were backfilling that tunnel

to make sure that there was no asymmetric loading that would

cause collapse of the tunnel lining.

The work was dangerous, slow and difficult.

Collapses were common and, when the navvies reached the central section,

they found the rock so challenging they gave up on cut and cover.

They were faced with laboriously boring through

with picks and shovels.

It took five years to complete.

Navvy work was very dangerous.

If you have a compound fracture, you know,

a fracture where the bone is broken and the skin is broken,

you go to hospital and essentially they will probably amputate

the limb because your chances of it healing up are very low.

In those circumstances,

if you're working for a good canal company, they might compensate

you because, obviously, you can't go back and carry on being a navvy

and the chances are you will never have skilled work again.

The engineers and contractors knew that the smaller they kept

the tunnel width, the quicker and cheaper it would be to finish.

That meant they didn't include a towpath,

by which the horses could pull the boats through.

So, instead, boatmen had to leg their craft,

propelling boats through by walking along the walls of tunnels.

At some of the longer tunnels,

professional leggers could be hired for the journey.

25 years after construction began,

some sections of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal were open

and as a commercial venture it was working.

By 1795, boats were carrying wool, grain, cotton and limestone.

New companies wanted a share in the success.

Before the Foulridge Tunnel was completed, work started on two

new canals across the Pennines,

but these would be shorter and more direct.

The first was the Rochdale Canal, engineered by William Jessop.

It would run from Rochdale to Sowerby Bridge near Halifax.

It was only 32 miles long, but needed 92 locks to cross the hills.

At the same time as the Rochdale Canal was started,

an even shorter crossing was proposed.

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal would start in Ashton Under Lyne

and run for just 20 miles.

This one was in the hands of the engineer Benjamin Outram.

His plan was so bold it verged on being reckless.

He wanted to build the longest

and highest canal tunnel in Britain, the Standedge Tunnel.

This pursuit of the ultimate shortcut would push

the boundaries of what was technically possible at the time.

This is Pule Hill,

1,300 feet above sea level on bleak Marsden Moor

and midway between Manchester and Leeds.

Outram had decided he could burrow straight through here for over

three miles and complete the entire canal in just five years.

His problems began with the layout of the tunnel.

Standedge Tunnel is down there, about 600 feet below the surface.

When Outram arrived here, he was faced with the immediate

problems of the remoteness of the site,

a climate that would swing wildly in the seasons

and a very limited knowledge of what lay beneath his feet.

When Outram visited the area, he had no idea about what

kind of rock was at depth.

And so when the tunnellers started cutting,

they cut through the shale,

but then encountered an ancient fault

that had thrown up the grit stone in their path,

and they had to drill and blast their way through it.

The work was painfully slow, hampered by poor workmanship,

interference from the canal company and lack of money.

The tunnel was hacked out by pick or blasted with black powder,

an early form of explosive.

In one year, just 150 yards was excavated.

The use of black powder was extremely dangerous.

The explosive power was low and unpredictable.

It would be another 75 years before the stable

and much more powerful dynamite was invented.

There were no safety fuses.

Instead, navvies would stuff gunpowder into goose quills,

light them and hope they burnt at the right speed.

Once the fuse was lit, the navvies clung to a rope,

one above the other, and were hauled up the shaft.

After the explosion,

they were lowered back down to clear up the broken rock.

Accidents happened when they simply weren't hauled high enough

above the danger zone.

It's thought that, during construction, 50 men were killed.

Outram was really too ambitious

because this involved major engineering works without,

really, the engineering skills

that had been developed on other waterways.

It was ambitious because it was very hard to estimate the costs

and actually very hard to estimate the kind of returns

that might be involved.

The canal really was a product of the canal mania,

excessive investment in the kind of projects

that might well make no money at all.

The engineer Benjamin Outram resigned

after seven years on the project.

To sort out the mess, the canal company now brought

in an engineer regarded as one of the greatest of his generation.

Thomas Telford was a meticulous Scotsman

who had worked across the country.

He was a master in building canals, castles, churches,

harbours, bridges and roads.

Engineers like Telford were now professional consultants,

giving independent advice to clients rather than being employees.

And he used trusted contractors to ensure consistency.

His was a more sophisticated approach

and he was taking advantage of the progress engineering had made.

Telford no longer had to follow the contours of the land

as his predecessors had.

He met his challenges head-on,

driving through hills in giant cuttings

and straddling the valleys with large embankments.

Telford resurveyed Standedge and found enormous errors.

The tunnel ends were at different heights

and the central alignment was off by three feet.

By following his instructions,

the company finally managed to complete the construction.

But even then, the problems at Standedge weren't over

as one of the supply reservoirs failed.

70 million gallons of water came crashing down the moors,

sweeping everything away in front of it,

and the cascading water scoured peat from the surface

and the black flood, as it was called,

hurtled through the Colne Valley wrecking mills and factories.

Five people were killed

and a 15-tonne boulder was swept two miles down the hills.

Standedge and the Huddersfield Canal had taken 17 years to complete,

more than three times the original estimate of Benjamin Outram.

And, by 1810, some 40 years after it had started,

the big prize, connecting Leeds and Liverpool, was almost within reach.

In that time, the Industrial Revolution had got into full swing.

Business was booming on the sections that were open.

And, at Parbold in Lancashire, the canal took a turn into history.

Instead of heading north, engineers now took the canal south

towards the rich coal seams around Wigan.

The canal finally joined up at Wigan in 1816.

The building of the canals led to a new scientific

understanding about materials, construction and mathematics.

Such big projects, with hundreds of men,

meant there was no longer a place for trial and error.

Civil engineering became a discipline that encompassed reliable

and accurate estimating of cost, design and the supervision of works.

Two years after the opening of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal,

the Institution of Civil Engineers was formed in London.

First president was Thomas Telford,

the man who had solved the problems at Standedge Tunnel.

A central theme of the institution became the sharing

and learning from other people's work.

The publication of learned society papers continues today.

It began in 1835 and there is a continuous record to today.

We still do that. We still have evening lectures.

We still have discussion meetings.

We still learn from each other and we still publish our findings.

And, of course, we have the additional benefit of the internet today,

which the early engineers would have been very glad to have.

What they were doing, in many ways, was creating

the equivalent of an internet for themselves

because the canal network and the road network

and then the rail networks

were binding networks that improved the means of communication.

By 1816, all the difficult geography and climate of the Pennines

had been overcome and they'd been crossed by three canals.

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal was the region's main transport artery.

Along its route sprang cotton mills, factories,

iron mills and warehousing.

The volume of goods carried by the canal increased rapidly.

Wool, grain, timber and passengers were all being transported in bulk

and coal remained the most commonly transported cargo.

Within a quarter of a century,

the Leeds and Liverpool Canal Company had paid off all its debts.

And within 50 years, the population of Leeds had trebled.

Britain's economy had undergone an explosive expansion,

allowing it to become the first industrial power in the world.

Engineers who'd focused on small sections of waterways

had built a network of canals that changed people's lives forever.

The men responsible for the design, layout and execution

of the early canals began as self-taught craftsman.

But in profiting by experience,

those who followed in their footsteps

were recognised as the country's foremost civil engineers.

The civil engineers who transformed Britain's landscape

have left us with awe-inspiring monuments to a bygone age.