Bridgewater Canal

The Bridgewater Canal is a canal in northwest England centered on Manchester. The entire canal has only one lock.

The Route

The canal begins at Castlefield Basin in Manchester city centre where the canal terminates, and joins to the Rochdale Canal, and where boats used to unload their cargoes. The canal travels east from Manchester for about four miles (7 kilometres) where it splits into two parts at "waters meeting" junction.

The original part of the canal travels northwest for about 15 miles (24 kilometres) until it reaches the town of Leigh. On the way it passes over the Manchester Ship Canal on the Barton Swing Aqueduct at Salford. At Leigh it makes an end-on connection to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

The other part of the canal travels about 20 miles southwest to Runcorn where it connects to the Trent and Mersey Canal, on the way passing through the towns of Sale and Lymm.

History

The Bridgewater canal was the first canal of the moder era to be built in Britain. It came about because the 3rd Earl of Bridgewater wanted an efficient way to transport coal from his coal mines at Worsley in Lancashire, into Manchester, where the Industrial Revolution was underway.

The Earl commisioned James Brindley to build the canal, and it opened in 1761. At the time it was considered a major engineering achievment, as the canal contained a large Aqueduct over the River Irwell, and it greatly enhanced Brindley's career. The worsley part of the canal was later extended to Leigh.

The Earl had invested a huge sum of his own money into constructing the canal, and it was a huge fianacial success. Due to the greatly increased supply of coal which the canal had enabled, the price of coal in Manchester fell by nearly three quarters within a year of the canal opening. A few years later construction began of the route to Runcorn which opened in 1772.

The canal carried commercial freight traffic until 1974, and is now used by pleasure craft.

The Bridgewater canal is unusual because it is one of the few canals in Briain which is still privately owned and was never nationalised. This is because it was bought by the Manchester Ship Canal company in the 1890s, which itself was never nationalised.