Thoughts on canal trust organisation

Canal societiesorganisation

“Waterways charities depend entirely on the goodwill of their members and supporters” - some further thoughts on canal trust organisation

More thoughts on canal societies

Following on from his piece in the last Before I wrote the first article, I made a list of issues – and the people associated – to prompt my memory when I got to article number two. Here’s a few examples, but I’ll still have a few to write about in the next issue of Navvies – if Martin will allow me the space.

One example that really should be obvious is about the way the Trust presents itself to the local population. Is the work party team on site and working hard on a regular basis for at least one day every week? Is the site left tidy and securely fenced at the end of each workday? Is there good site signage to caution against entering areas of the site where work is not yet complete? Is there signage about the overall objective, with the Trust’s branding, website and up-to-date contact information for further enquiries? Occasionally a landowner will feel they should be asked for their permission before signage is displayed on the site – so a rations take many years to complete, and volunteers are more likely to be drawn into the project if they can see there’s a regular day each week so they can

issue giving an independent view on canal societies’ governance, the author, who has previously served on the turn up on that day expecting to be able to contribute.

Conversations with passers-by are

Inland Waterways Association’s Restoration Committee and as a Trustee of three canal societies, has brought us another element of the marketing mix –being able to sound as if you and your organisation will stick at it until the job is

some further thoughts on how these organisations should organise themselves and their activities... completed will encourage those passers-by to feel more confident of a positive outcome

from your work. It might even result in more people joining and becoming part of the active membership – or perhaps donations towards your funds.

To me, it is a statement of the obvious that waterways restoration charities depend entirely on the goodwill of their members and supporters. The management posture should be welcoming and encouraging. Anyone who helps, or wants to help, is a friend to be thanked. If a volunteer needs to be reprimanded for action that the management doesn’t approve of, the reprimand should be gentle, and fair. The volunteer has given of their time and skills in support of

polite approach, perhaps asking for their approval to the style, size, and wording of the sign is called for.

A reputation for determination and persistence is a good thing – waterway restothe objective – they are not an employee

Pictures by John Hawkins

who gets paid for the time they put in. Leaders in a voluntary organisation should tread carefully, and think carefully, when they make accusations against volunteers. Those volunteers might well be doing the right thing for the charity – or feel that they are doing the right thing. They absolutely should not be treated as hostile to the charity or to its objective – the vast majority of their actions, over time, will already have demonstrated that they are positive about what the charity is established to deliver.

My first article mentioned the financial reputation of the waterways restoration charity – it’s all in the public domain – and very accessible given the internet. It’s important to have sound financial processes in the charity – so that the small sums needed to ensure sites are kept presentable are promptly made available. Larger commitments to take on the restoration of, say, a complete lock chamber, will need careful investigation of the costs to complete – and some funds available to cover contingencies which arise once work has started.

A project to restore a structure should, if possible, have all the funds in place before work on the ground starts. A project that pauses for an extended period tells a story that the organisation behind the project starts things without thinking through how it will complete them. That’s not a good reputation to have when your charitable objective is the completion of a large, long-term project. There aren’t many waterway restoration trusts for whom their total project cost is

less than £10m – and many have a need for more than £100m to see ‘their’ waterway reopened.

I have heard the view that tackling the restoration of a structure represents more of a risk than a scrub-bash project where the canal trust only has a limited-duration lease over the land. I feel there’s a balance to be considered here – a scrub-bash project can only be seen as a success if there’s regular maintenance to stop the land reverting to scrub. A restored structure is ‘hard’ – bricks and concrete. It takes nature a lot longer to conceal the work that’s been done and it’s virtually impossible to destroy a completed lock, for example, through lack of maintenance. If the skills mix and preferences of the volunteers are more in the direction of structures – that’s the thing to major on. Structures take up less space and need less maintenance to keep them tidy when compared to a length of restored channel.

A final thought for this article is that success breeds success. A restoration charity that can point to (or show on its website) the successes it has had in the past stands more chance of attracting more, and more-skilled, volunteers to support its project. I’ve attended meetings of a group of capable people focussed on working together to deliver a canal and to make the wider world aware of their work. I was welcomed and encouraged to participate and, when it became possible for me, I was proud to join that board of trustees. I’ve seen more people offer to join the board since I joined – and all those people have

Pictures for illustration purposes - no comment impied on the canal socieities! brought useful skills and done constructive work to advance our Trust. I’m sure the opposite situation can arise, where the incumbents are hostile to newcomers and gradually the effectiveness of the whole organisation starts to suffer.

I do want to write a further article in this series –so please do write to me with your thoughts, questions, ideas – perhaps you disagree with what I’ve written and want to put another view forward. Please do! Luke Walker

If you do have any thoughts on either of Luke’s articles,

feature Going further afield

Canal restoration doesn’t stop at the English Channel: we’ve got a selection of reports of progress on canal reopening elsewhere in Europe

Waterways international...

There’s been a bit of theme of “taking the wider view” in some of the articles in this issue. In the absence of a great deal happening at the moment as far as WRG working parties are concerned, we’ve looked back to what was happening in 1970 when WRG was founded. We’ve looked forward to some interesting forthcoming work on the Montgomery, the Cromford and the Wey & Arun. We’ve looked a bit further forward to a couple of the more off-the-wall ideas for funding major restoration that look like they’re starting to produce the goods.

And finally, we’ll take a look a bit further afield to a few very interesting things that are happening elsewhere in Europe - as reported by World Wide Waterways, the annual magazine of Inland Waterway International. And they don’t come much more interesting than the opening of a brand new canal...

Kimola Canal OK, I’ll come clean. The Kimola Canal, billed as Finland’s first brand new canal for 25 years, isn’t actually an entirely new canal at all. And it’s only 5.5km long. But neither of those need detract from its opening, because as far as boating is concerned, it’s opening up 30km of able to navigate before. Let me explain...

The huge Päijänne lake navigation, a system of connected lakes dams prevented access to the adjacent series of lakes around Kouvola town. Over a century ago a canal was built to bypass the river and link the two lake systems together, but (as was common at the time - and still happens elsewhere in Finland) the cargo of timber wasn’t carried in barges, it was tied together in rafts. So half of the canal was built at the higher level of the Päijänne system, half at the lower level of the Kouvola lakes, and where they met, a crane was installed to lift logs between the levels.

This crane, out of use since the log traffic ended, has been replaced by a single deep lock (12m rise) leading into a rock tunnel, which provides a navigable link between the lakes, and adds another 30km of

water that boats haven’t ever been

covering a sizeable area in the southern half of the country, provides a total length of 300km of navigation, and covers a total of 37,000 square kilometres of lake area. At its south eastern tip, an unnavigable length of the Kymi River including a couple of hydroelectric navigable water to the Päijänne system.

Inland Waterways International

I’ve got another confession to make. A couple of years ago, on a holiday in the Netherlands, I visited Utrecht. Arriving by tram in the city centre, I found that there seemed to be quite a lot of construction work going on. A new road or railway line, I guessed, and didn’t stop to look more closely...

Imagine my surprise (and annoyance at having failed to take any photos!) when I later found out that they were actually demolishing a motorway and reinstating a 12th century canal. This was the Stadsbuitengracht, a canal circuit which formed a defensive moat surrounding the mediaeval city in time of war, as well as being used in peacetime for transport, connected to the River Vecht and other waterways. It lasted right up to the 1970s before the authorities, keen to allow better access to the city for road vehicles, filled in a length of it known as the Catherijnesingel and used the route to create a motorway. Since the 1990s this has been regarded as a mistake, in 2002 local residents voted in favour of reversing it, and earlier this year work was completed on removing the motorway and reinstating the canal, whose entire 6km circuit is once again open to boats.

And more...

In Serbia, on the Danube-Tisza-Danube Canal system (a partially navigable network of over 600km of interconnected canals, which links the River Danube to the River Tisza, crosses it and then links back to the Danube again, hence the slightly odd name), two locks have been reopened. They are the Bezdan Lock (a pioneering concrete structure

going back to 1856) and the Šebešfok Lock, and they open up access to the Baja-Bezdan Canal, and across the border into Hungary.

In Norway, the “world’s second ship canal tunnel” (I don’t know where the first one is, can anyone help?) the Selje is set to be built, creating a 1.7km underground link between two fjords, capable of taking vessels up to 37m headroom and 26.5m beam.

In France, the Canal des Ardennes and the Canal de la Sambre a l’Oise, both shut for years as a result of structure failures, are to be reopened in 2021. Although the fact that they were allowed to fall into disuse for so long isn’t a great reflection on the navigation authorities (reminiscent of the Tunnels Crisis here in the 1980s), hopefully it indicates a chance of a better future than seemed likely less than a year ago, when the possibility of permanent closure of 20 percent of the French network was seen as a serious threat.

And finally in Poland, there’s a proposal to extend navigation on the River Odra up to the Czech border.

Martin Ludgate

To join Inland Waterways International and find out more about overseas canals, see inlandwaterwaysinternational.org