Building the Canals Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain

The quiet waters of the Bridgewater Canal here at Worsley,

give us no idea of what a great engineering achievement it was to build it in the 18th century,

or of how it revolutionised Britain

as it made the transport of heavy goods ten times faster and more efficient than it had been before.

My search to discover how builders and engineers have shaped Britain has brought me close to home,

where the mid-18th century saw the building of the first canals and the birth of civil engineering.

Canals were the arteries of the Industrial Revolution.

They helped provide cheaper goods and raw materials

and cut the journey time from London to Birmingham to four or five days.

It all started here at Worsley, near where I live.

From the mid-18th century, Britain was bursting with industry and commerce

and a way had to be found to move raw materials to the new factories

and to get products to the consumers.

The answer came from Francis Egerton, the third Duke of Bridgewater,

who had made his fortune from coal.

Some say the Duke of Bridgewater was thwarted in love

so he channelled all his energies into a grand plan

to build a canal from Worsley to Manchester to get coal there for the spinning mills that were being built.

And, of course, he engaged the services of a very clever engineer called James Brindley.

Brindley was a mining engineer with the difficult job

of digging the Duke's mines and removing the water that flooded them.

This gave him the right experience to build Britain's first canal.

This is Worsley canal basin,

and 250 years ago, it were a hive of activity around here.

Little boats, like that one, came through the remains of this here sluice gate and out of this tunnel.

They were loaded with coal. When they got to the basin, they off-loaded it into bigger boats for Manchester.

This is the entrance to a labyrinth of 52 miles of hidden canal workings

connecting the Duke of Bridgewater's coal mines to the Bridgewater Canal.

The yellow ochre in the water comes from the coal measures and iron ore,

and that's why the water's orange.

Work on the Bridgewater Canal started in 1759.

It was 10½ miles in length and cost nearly £50,000.

It was opened in 1765 and was an immediate success.

Not only was Bridgewater able to cut the cost of his coal by half,

but the canal itself was soon earning him £75,000 a year.

Building a canal like this were a major engineering achievement.

There were a lot of work that nobody could see.

Behind the actual facing stonework, there were quite a lot of brickwork to give it bulk and weight.

At the top, they nearly always had great big coping stones, which gave the edge of it a nice finish.

In the bottom, to stop the water running out, there'd be 18 inches or 2 foot of puddle in the bottom.

What it amounts to is lining the bottom of the porous ground, or the canal, with a layer of clay.

Mr Brindley had trouble convincing the men of power in Parliament

that you could dig a man-made river. They thought if you dug a trench, the water would run out of it.

Apparently, he went to Parliament with a dollop of clay, made a hole in the middle and filled it with water.

Of course, he got his way. The Canal Acts were passed, and lots of canals were built all over England.

Now, we're ready for the water.

If we've done it right, it should stay full of water for ever.

Now...

Now, then. There it is!

Full of water. Doesn't seem to be leaking. Mr Brindley would be proud.

Mixing up enough puddle, or clay, to make a tea service

or a parliamentary demonstration were pretty easy.

But when you think they had to mix thousands of tons of this, some automation crept in in a small way.

They'd drive herds of cattle down here after they'd put the clay in.

The hooves would have a wonderful kneading effect in the clay,

and do the required mixing for them.

To get the Bridgewater Canal from Worsley to Manchester,

Brindley had to find a way of getting it over the River Irwell at Barton.

He had another ingenious solution to the problems of canal engineering.

His Barton Aqueduct, which carried boats 40ft above the river,

was so amazing in its time, it was considered a wonder of the world.

There's not much of it left, but I can show you what it WOULD have been like cos there's another one nearby.

This one wasn't actually built by Brindley, but it must have been inspired by his innovations.

It's disused now, but because of this, it's easy to see how it was built.

There was one near me at Darcy Lever, and they actually blew the thing up.

They had a tough time doing it. It gave me an insight into how the thing were constructed.

They used to call it the "wooden bottoms", as it was lined with timber

and you couldn't sink in the mud when you went swimming in it in summer!

When they chiselled it apart to blow the arches up, they came across these unbelievable pieces of timber -

blocks of wood about two foot square and 90ft long, all encased in clay.

And when they uncovered it, it were almost like brand-new wood, you know.

It's incredible when you think, 1700-odds, they're taking canals across the tops of rivers like this.

The canal was part of a system built in the 18th and early 19th century

to transport coal and cotton and timber to Manchester, Bury and Bolton

and all the little places in between.

It's exceptionally well-built for a canal.

It's very wide, as well.

It were actually built for boats of 14-foot-2-inch beam, you know.

It's almost a ship. You could go down the Manchester Ship Canal with it.

It wasn't only used for coal. It brought cotton, timber, bricks and even china clay from Cornwall.

And, of course, they had a few packet boats which sailed at great speed

and had the right of way over all the boats, with a postilion with a bugle. "Get out the way - we're coming."

I know this canal very well. All my life, I've played around here.

I've even sailed along it in a home-made boat

made out of half a bicycle wheel, stolen slate laths and a wagon sheet,

and tar out the cobble stones to stop it leaking.

I've ridden my bicycle along the edge here - and I can't swim - from here to Bury, as fast as you could go.

I have had a long and interesting relationship with this bit of canal, believe me.

Because parts of it have been drained now, it's easy to see how well cut the stonework is.

I'm actually walking on the bed of the canal.

You can see the quality of the stonework, even below water level, somewhere around here.

They didn't lessen the quality of the workmanship as they got to the base.

But the real reason that I'm here is this.

One terrible day in 1936,

the canal bursted at this point, and all the coal boats went down the hill into the river Irwell. A catastrophe.

You can see from the twisted metal that various attempts have been made to strengthen the bank,

and it worked for nearly 150 years.

In the end, the pressure of the water got too much.

This place shows the sheer scale of the engineering work involved.

One of the most ambitious projects

was a canal across the Pennines, from Leeds to Liverpool.

The route had been surveyed by an engineer called John Longbotham,

between 1765 and 1767.

Longbotham's plan had been seen and approved by Brindley,

and Brindley got the job of chief engineer on the salary of £400pa.

But by this time, he'd become involved with a further 363 other canal projects of some sort.

I think his workload was too much for him - two years later, he died.

So, Longbotham got the job.

It was a huge undertaking. This was no ordinary canal.

The Leeds And Liverpool Canal stretched for 127 miles

and climbed over the Pennine Chain, the backbone of England.

Work began in 1770, and at any one time,

the Leeds And Liverpool Canal Company had between 200 and 500 men employed on the construction.

It was also very dangerous.

The records of the Canal Company are dotted with names of men who got injured and were paid compensation.

Look...

George Clark and Hugh Fraser received one guinea each when scaffolding fell on them in a tunnel they were doing.

And the company paid the surgeon's bill.

The whole enterprise was very expensive.

It was only worth doing if it could dramatically cut transport costs.

It immediately proved its worth

when the first stretch, running from Bingley to Skipton, was completed.

On Thursday 3rd April in 1773, amongst great celebration,

two barges arrived here at Skipton and they were loaded with coal.

This coal sold for half the price that coal sold for previously here.

The route from Bingley to Skipton winds through very hilly terrain.

Naturally, water won't flow uphill,

so the canal engineers had to come up with a way of making a long, flat stretch of water go up and down hill.

The answer was the lock. There's more to lock gates than meets the eye.

At first, you think they're just a great pair of waterproof doors. But they're not really doors.

They have no hinges... They're almost floating, even though they're made out of great lumps of wood.

They're finely balanced with a lump of timber that's sticking out.

At each side, there are two semicircular grooves

and the edge of the lock gate is timber and it's curved to that shape.

When the pressure of water fills the lock, it pushes both radius-ed ends' edges into the grooves

and forms a watertight seal.

In the middle, it's angled at the correct angle for being watertight.

They're nearly all made of oak and elm. Elm's beautiful for chucking in water and it lasting for ever.

The best place to see how they work is the Five Rise Locks at Bingley,

which lift the Leeds And Liverpool Canal an amazing 60ft.

These things here are called paddles, and in the bottom of the lock gate,

there are two sluice gates - one on each side.

It raises the gate and lets the water out the lock into the next chamber.

Later on, they tried making them out of iron - I suppose, an economy.

It didn't work, cos under pressure, iron bends, and once bent, don't come back.

The wood, which is more expensive, is a dead cert to work.

They've got to be so tough and strong because of the bashing about they get

by boats that are toing and froing every day.

A system of staircase - or riser - locks, like this, is a number of locks all joined together.

As well as allowing the canal to climb a short, steep hill,

they're also cheaper to build than the same number of single locks because they have shared gates.

With the completion of this first section of the canal,

landowners along the routes soon began to see the moneymaking opportunities it brought them.

At Skipton, Lord Thanet, who owned limestone quarries close to the castle where he lived,

decided to construct a branch from the canal to the quarries. With a link to the canal,

he would be able to transport his stone quickly and cheaply to the businessmen of West Yorkshire.

This was the Springs Branch.

It joins the canal here and runs for about a quarter of a mile, up through Skipton to the castle.

It stops at the bottom of the cliff, right under the castle wall.

It's beautifully peaceful here now, but 200 years ago, it was absolute bedlam.

The limestone would be loaded into wagons and sent down the tramway, down to the castle.

This is where the wagons pulled up on the journey from the quarry.

The stones were tipped down chutes in between these abutments and went 100 feet down, into the boats.

The only problem was, the drop was so high, it damaged the boats at the bottom in the canal.

The noise, of course, of the falling stones annoyed the occupants of the castle.

This was a nonstop operation. The bargemen would load up down below,

carry their load down to Bingley or Leeds, then come straight back again.

They wouldn't sleep until their barge was waiting in the queue at Springs Branch for the next load.

Work went on here night and day. Nowadays you can only dream of what the racket must've been like.

In the end, the inhabitants of the castle had had enough of the racket of the stones falling down the chutes

and decided to build a bypass in the form of this magnificent inclined plane.

Of course, what happens on an inclined plane,

the full wagons would go down on the end of a wire rope controlled by a brake drum at the top.

The remains of the building that it were in are still there.

That would pull the empty wagons back up to the top to be refilled and sent back down.

Here and there, you can still see traces of the track. The remains of one of the railway sleepers.

Complete with peg or holding-down nail!

Incredible!

And over here, there's the original lighting system. Been here for a long time.

It's a wonder nobody's nicked that.

In fact, all along this inclined plane, you can find evidence of the railway.

It's obviously been a two-track affair at one time.

They would unload here at the foot of these old abutments

and pour the stone down the chutes into the waiting barges.

The next section, from Skipton to Burnley, took the canal over the Pennines into Lancashire.

To get it over the highest bit, they had to build a tunnel here at Foulridge.

It took six years to build this tunnel, under atrocious conditions.

The rain constantly came down through the roof, dripping down, as you can see.

I suppose, before they got the stonework in, it would be a lot worse than what it is now.

Most of these early navvies who did the tunnelling were ex-miners.

It weren't that important down a pit keeping everything perfectly straight.

I think this accounts for the amount of funny doglegs there are in a lot of canal tunnels.

They'd not quite got it in line, because the art of surveying then wasn't as good as it is now.

First, they would walk over the top in as straight a line as they could -

with the equivalent to a theodolite, maybe a telescope or something as simple as that -

and mark out a series of pegs,

and then sink a line of shafts

down to the level where the tunnel were going to be.

Then they'd proceed to drive headings from each end of the bottom of the shaft.

They would have a semi-mobile winding gear, a bit like a small colliery would have.

The debris would be raised up the shaft in a kibble,

which is a name for a small, iron barrel. As the tunnel advanced through the mountain,

they would dismantle it and move it up to the next shaft.

Robert Whitworth, the engineer, reported to the canal committee

that the wages were four times what they should have been because the original estimates were grossly out.

They didn't reckon on the shifting sands at each end. When they got here,

the lakes and water above were coming in constantly and creating trouble. No wonder it took six years.

Some sections of the tunnelling were so difficult, they had to use a different method of building.

Because the ground was so unstable, they couldn't build a conventional tunnel.

So they had to do a thing called cut-and-cover, whereby they'd dig a great cutting through the hillside

and then put in the centring.

In reality it would be made of wood,

but I've used... ex-GPO fibreglass telegraph pole.

Um...the...

and then once the centring was in position,

they would proceed to lay the masonry, which had been cut to shape.

With it all being exposed to daylight, they could do a much better job

and use much bigger stones. You would have had great difficulty putting them in a conventional tunnel.

Squeezing them in between the rock roof and the top of the centring would have been very difficult.

But outside here, you could even have had a crane to lift the stones and put 'em on top of the centring.

After the last stones had been firmly cemented into position,

they would then proceed to cover the whole lot up...very carefully, I should imagine.

They wouldn't have chucked it around.

They'd have been making sure that the pressure, as they filled it in, were equal on both sides,

to squeeze the arch down onto the centring,

which is very important.

Lots of disasters have been had when it's not been done quite right.

They must have literally moved thousands of tons of dirt in wheelbarrows,

and no doubt up to their necks in mud.

It's a credit, really, to our illustrious ancestors.

After they'd got the masonry and the centring all buried under 30 feet of unstable ground again,

they would then proceed to withdraw the wedges from underneath the centring,

which would lower the centring, and then they could withdraw it.

So they could just move it up a bit and put some more masonry on,

and keep advancing like that through the hillside.

As you can see, when the centring's been removed,

you end up with rather a beautiful, smooth, strong, arched tunnel.

There were no tunnel boring machines,

so all the digging had to be done by hand - sheer, hard manual labour.

The men who built the canals were professional navvies

and followed the line of the canal and lived in great encampments.

But they were viewed by the locals as bad news. Here, in the Canal Company records, is an account of a riot

which happened at a place called Barrowford.

"In 1792," it says, "a riot of a very serious nature occurred amongst the townspeople of Barrowford

"and the workmen employed upon the canal. The fighting had to be broken up by the local militia,

"led by a certain Captain Clayton."

But, in spite of the odd bit of trouble like this,

work at the Leeds end progressed at a fair rate.

By 1796, the canal stretched all the way from Leeds to Burnley.

At the Liverpool end, though, there were all sorts of delays and complications,

and it took another 20 years to complete the link from Leeds.

Boats were now able to ply their trade all the way across the Pennines

from Leeds to Liverpool. The cost of raw materials was slashed as the cost of transport came tumbling down.

They carried stone and brick

to build the factories and the industrial towns that began to spring up along the banks of the canal,

raw cotton and wool, direct from the port of Liverpool to the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire,

and the finished products to the consumers.

One of the most magnificent mills was built on the banks of the canal

here at Saltaire, by an industrialist called Titus Salt.

Alpaca wool from the backs of S American llamas was shipped all the way to Liverpool

and brought all the way across the Pennines, here, and loaded into the warehouse through these very doors.

This is where it all ended up, where once there were 1,200 looms

weaving 30,000 yards of cloth every day.

It must've been quite noisy in here, what with the clatter of the shuttles and what have you.

Two vertical shafts came from the engines down below with big bevel gears on top

which drove the shaft in this long strip, down the middle of the room,

and the belts would come out the floor to each of the looms. No wonder they were all deaf!

A whole town was built around the mill.

It only existed because of the canal supplying the wool.

In its heyday, over 2,500 people worked in this mill.

They all walked to work. They were close, in a wonderful model village built by Salt himself.

It had a beautiful, Italian-style church, a library, a social centre.

The only thing that wasn't here were public houses,

because Mr Salt was a Nonconformist and didn't approve of alcohol.

For over 150 years, it was alive with industry and activity, all along the banks of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

But not any more.

At the Lancashire end, it were almost lined every 100 yards by a spinning mill.

And here in Leigh, you know, I remember when I was about 15, coming along this very towpath,

and you could see all the great steam engines that turned all these mills round.

It's a lot different now. All the steam engines have gone. It's sad really,

because these octagonal-shaped towers on each corner are quite ornate.

I bet when it were first built it were beautiful, that. Yellow, terracotta and Accrington brick.

It's very sad, when you come round here and look at all the collapsed buildings and the dereliction.

I actually pulled down a few of the chimneys round here. This is one of the only ones left.

And this is only HALF the size it used to be.

Everything round here's changed. The canal's changed as well.

It's mainly used today for leisure and pleasure - canal-boat cruising and fishing, and things like that.

Other than the warehouses,

there's precious little left to remind us that this were the motorway of the early 19th century.

But that's just what it was.

Nowadays, it takes a couple of hours to nip down the M62.

But before the canal, it took weeks to travel over the Pennines.

Those early civil engineers who built the Leeds And Liverpool Canal

helped to revolutionise transport in Britain. They made cheap travel across the Pennines possible

and laid the foundations for the Industrial Age.

They helped turn Britain into the workshop of the world in the Victorian Age.

And next week, I'll be visiting our greatest and most famous Victorian building,

the Houses of Parliament, and I'll be going to the top of Big Ben.

If you'd like to find out more about the building of Britain,

then why not visit the website at -

Subtitles by Alison Haggart and Audrey Flynn BBC Scotland 2002