Uttoxeter Online Magazine

Not much is left of the Uttoxeter Canal, just a old disused lock and a mile post

Uttoxeter had a canal for a period of 36 years, from 1811 to 1847. It was a branch of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and it came down the Churnet valley to terminate at a wharf which lay near the north end of High Street, in the angle formed by Cheadle Road and Park Street. In spite of the passage of time this area of town is still known as The Wharf, and the original canal warehouse still existed until very recently, having been converted into the western, or slightly lower, half of the factory belonging to Richard Cooper and Company Limited, locally known as "the corset factory".

 The Concept of the Trent and Mersey Canal
Throughout history boats on rivers have been used to transport goods, but England's rivers were not really suitable for much navigation, and by the time of Elizabeth 1st it is estimated that there were only 685 miles of navigable waterway, much of it tidal and subject to moving channels. The nearest "port" to Uttoxeter was Nottingham, about 35 miles away with very poor roads. After the Civil War serious attempts were made to extend the waterway system (fighting opposition from towns such as Nottingham and York which had become important distribution centres for water-bourne goods). The Trent was made navigable up to Wilden Ferry which was very close to Shardlow, south east of Derby. The site of the ferry was just slightly up river from where the present A6 crosses over the river by the Cavendish Bridge, and for a number of years this was accepted as the Head of Trent Navigation.

There came another session of extension of navigation in the years 1697 to 1700 and yet another in 1719 to 1721, and the three periods resulted in the navigable miles being increased from 685 to 1,160. In 1699 a Private Act of Parliament was passed to make the Trent navigable from Wilden Ferry up to Burton-upon-Trent and Burton then developed into a small inland port. The river between Wilden Ferry and Burton was shallow and difficult and at times of drought it became almost impossible for movement of boats.

All rivers were used as sources of water power and had mills, and often weirs, along them, and in times of drought boat masters had to persuade mill owners to release flushes of water to increase the depth of water below the weirs (and incidentally to decrease the depth above the weirs until the water level gradually recovered) so that much argument and delay occurred and the system was far from ideal. The boats moved under sail power if the wind happened to be suitable, or else they were hauled by gangs of men, called bow-hauliers, because the river towing path was merely a right of way with streams to ford and stiles to climb and other obstructions to be passed or surmounted, and men were more capable than horses. By law river haulage on the Upper Trent was restricted to man-hauling until 1783, so Burton as a port had its problems. However, it meant that Uttoxeter had access to water transport with less than a fifteen mile journey, a situation which was common to many of the towns in England by 1724.

As early as 1717 Thomas Congreve of Wolverhampton had proposed the construction of a navigable link between the Trent and the Severn, but it was not until about 1750 that canal building became a technical possibility. As a result of the technical advances, in 1758 James Brindley, assisted by John Smeaton, began a series of surveys for what he called a Grand Trunk Canal to link the Trent "in the region of Wilden Ferry" to the Mersey "in the region of the Runcorn Gap." His canal was to have its summit at Etruria, between Hanley and Newcastle-under-Lyme, and was to pass under the high ground north west of Tunstall by using a tunnel 2,880 yards long. The choice of a tunnel, rather than making use of the somewhat higher Bathpool Gap to the west, was made because of difficulties with water supply. One of the problems with the higher reaches of -a canal is that water is always being lost from the canal, partly by leakage and partly through the locks each time that a lock is used. The region in which Brindley had proposed to put his tunnel was a region riddled with mine workings, and Brindley intended to tap into the drainage system of the mines to obtain water for his canal.

James Brindley
James Brindley was born in 1716, the son of a Peak District farmer. As a member of a very ordinary family, he was apprenticed to a mill wright near Macclesfield and he learned many skills in addition to mill building and repairing and water management. At the age of twenty-seven he set up his own business in Leek and became a very successful water engineer, involved with water mills and drainage schemes. His successes locally led him to be employed by the Duke of Bridgewater who owned coal mines at Worsley and who wished to move coal by canal to Manchester, a few miles from Worsley, and it was the Bridgewater Canal which opened in 1761 that was really the beginning of "The Canal Idea".

Earl Gower of Trentham, who was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Bridgewater, employed James Brindley to carry out the 1758 survey for a canal to link The Trent and The Mersey. Earl Gower's interest, and the success of the Bridgewater Canal after it had opened in 1761 caused the idea of a canal to be considered by various groups of people in North Staffordshire who realised that they were thirty miles from navigable water, with transport being limited to pack animals and to vehicles on very poor roads.