except perhaps on the Uttoxeter Canal

Editorial forward or back?

Will there be Canal Camps this summer? And will developers have got permission to trash the Uttoxeter? Or will the council have stood up to them?

Going forward into a summer of Canal Camps?

Are we being overoptimistic? Let’s just have a quick look back at the last six issues of Navvies, since the last ‘normal’ one came out in February 2020 with a preview of a jolly summer of Canal Camps to look forward to, lots of training opportunities to get us ready for it, a call thfor volunteers for Little Venice, and plenty of pics of people sharing WRG 50 birthday cakes on worksites up and down the country. And then it all changed. Since then we’ve had...

·The ‘Lots is going on in the background’ issue · The ‘Cake and hope for the future’ issue · The ‘Getting back to work’ (at least for local canal societies) issue · What was going to be the ‘WRG is back on site’ issue, but despite two successful weekend digs turned into the ‘Taking the wider view’ issue as the Covid rates went up again · The ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’ issue with WRG taking the first steps towards planning for future Canal Camps · The ‘A way forward’ issue as those plans began to crystallise

Given this list, I think you could be forgiven for feeling that after a year of false dawns, the credibility of this continuing optimistic tone is beginning to wear just a teeny-weeny bit thin. Indeed, you may well be having thoughts along the lines of “Come on folks, exactly how, why and for how much longer is Navvies keeping this pretence going?” And yes, while I stand by what we said at the time it was written in each of these issues (although it was subsequently overtaken by events multiple times), we do seem to have been predicting that “things are going to get better” for rather a long time, while for a fair bit of that time they manifestly haven’t got much better. Perhaps I should have gone with my initial gut instincts in the depths of winter and produced the “Christ almighty, can it get any worse?” issue.

So all-in-all I fear that it might be getting to be increasingly hard work trying to convince you that any positive ‘looking forward’ type stuff in any more issues is to be taken seriously. Unless it’s accompanied by something a bit more concrete. Well in this issue, it is. Firstly, those of you who have been Martin Ludgate receiving an electronic 2014 WRG Camp on Uttoxeter Bridge 70. But will it ever see a boat? page 4

copy of Navvies for the last six issues (i.e. everyone except the relatively small number whose email address we didn’t have) will notice that for this one we’ve gone back to print. We haven’t yet gone back to the old way of doing things – not only is running a volunteer envelope-stuffing session in central London (and a rush-hour tube ride to get there) still not really a Covid-sensible thing to do, but the company that used to make the plates for John Hawkins’ printing press has gone out of business and we haven’t found another yet. So it’s costing us quite a bit more, but we feel it’s worth it as (a) a response to the overwhelming majority who replied to my editorial in issue 304 in support of returning to paper printing, and to the feeling that people simply weren’t reading the e-version, and more importantly (b) part of a commitment to getting back to work and to reality, if not quite to ‘normal’.

And secondly you’ll find in this issue a ‘camps preview’ article which aims to give you the closest thing we can manage to a prediction of which canals will be hosting Canal Camps later this year. No, we don’t have a dates list yet. No, we aren’t yet certain that all of these sites will feature on it. And no, we can’t even be 100 percent sure that there will be a camps programme at all – for all we know there might be another twist in the Covid story which could yet throw another spanner in the works. But we’re confident enough of there being a good chance of a Canal Camps season running from August onwards that we’ve decided to go into print. We hope to have more – including details of dates and sites – in the next issue. And in the meantime, keep an eye on the WRG website and Facebook group for updates. And we might even bring back the Navvies Diary pages!

...or going backwards into the Dark Ages?

Having started out on an optimistic note with signs that WRG really is coming to life at last, it’s all the more galling to have to recount that in Staffordshire, a promising canal restoration project may or may not (by the time you read this) have been dealt a fatal blow at the hands of a housing developer more interested in short term profit than the future of the canals, and (if they have given the plans the go-ahead) a local authority with no integrity / vision / spine.

The canal in question is the Uttoxeter, where the Caldon & Uttoxeter Canals Trust has spent the last 15 years building on the success of the Destination Froghall project, broadening its vision from simply creating a better terminus for the Caldon Canal to pushing for the reopening of the whole 13 miles down the beautiful but inaccessible Churnet Valley and back through to Uttoxeter. It’s not an easy restoration – it was shut as long ago as the 1840s, parts of it were used for a railway line, and the final few miles from Denstone to Uttoxeter will probably have to be replaced by a new canal on a different alignment. But studies have shown that reopening it is feasible, WRG and CUCT volunteers have carried out a fair amount of work on it (including three WRG Reunion weekends, several Canal Camps and regular local working parties), it’s been taken sufficiently seriously to gain support in the form of funding from the Lottery via the Landscape Partnerhips initiative, and it’s seen its first major practical project completed in the form of the rebuilt Bridge 70.

But when I say “it is feasible”, by now I might actually mean “it was feasible”. Because at one pinch-point, right at the start of the route at Froghall, property developers have put in a planning application to Staffordshire Moorlands District Council in February to build a housing estate right slap bang across the route of the canal, not only blocking the original line but also (given the constricted location at the bottom of a deep valley) any practicable alternative route around it. Steve Wood of CUCT reckons that this will totally stop the restoration in its tracks – there simply won’t be any way through. No, of course it wouldn’t actually be impossible to bypass it – I guess perhaps a tunnel and maybe some new flights of locks might do the trick. (Or a couple of boat lifts? They’re all the rage, aren’t they?) But realistically Steve believes that this “permanently ends any opportunity to reinstate the canal” – and that will be the end of CUCT’s restoration plans. And the volunteers’ work there over 15 years will have been wasted.

This is serious. It’s hard to think of another case where a single bad planning decision has so comprehensively put paid to an entire active canal restoration. Perhaps the decision by British Waterways to sell off chunk of the Shrewsbury & Newport Canals for demolition in the early 1960s, just as the first restoration scheme was getting going? But even that only put its reopening back by a mere few decades.

To make matters worse, the planning application flies in the face of policies already adopted to preserve the route of the Uttoxeter Canal for the future. It’s in contravention of the agreed Staffordshire Moorlands Local Plan and Churnet Valley Masterplan documents, both of which protect the canal line. So does that mean the Council planners will have felt duty bound to turn down the application? Well I’m sure we all hope so –but it isn’t always that simple. And the key to it is that part of the site is a piece of ‘brownfield’ (ex industrial) land that the council actually wants to see developed. Martin Ludgate

It wouldn’t be the first Boat on restored length of Naviglio Pavese, Milan (see p16) time that this kind of theoretical protection for a canal restoration was put to the test (it looked like happening on the Lapal a few years back) by a developer putting forward what they knew was a non-compliant (but presumably more profitable) scheme – in the expectation that the council wouldn’t dare to insist on the plans being modified to cater for a restored canal, for fear that the developer would simply walk away (on the grounds that it would no longer be worth their while developing it at all) and leave them stuck with a useless piece of undeveloped land.

In between (in CUCT’s view) dismissing the canal’s historical importance, playing down how much their housing estate will damage it and rubbishing the prospects of it being restored by their comments in the application, the developers claim it’s a difficult site to develop, it’s barely financially viable, and they’ll ‘only’ make a modest couple of million from the houses on the canal line. What about the often-quoted ‘added value’ to housing prices that a waterside location is said to bring? I guess by the time the canal was restored and that kicked in, it would be the next generation of home owners who would reap the benefit.

But let’s not waste too much breath on the building developers. They’re a private company. It’s their job to make money. That’s ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ as our Prime Minister would say. It’s the council’s that’s there to decide whether the development is for the good of the area or not – and to stand up to developers who are playing hardball. By the time you read this we’ll know whether they did. Or whether Staffordshire Moorlands will go down in waterways history as the council that sank the Uttoxeter Canal.

Broadening the appeal...

I’ll end on a more upbeat note. Following my report a couple of issues back on some interesting developments in waterway restoration in mainland Europe, I’ve gone one step further this time and included an entire restoration feature about the ancient and fascinating ‘Navigli’ canals of the Milan area of northern Italy where there are good prospects for restoration. And I’ve also included a piece from the Manchester Bolton & Bury with some thoughts on how to make a difficult canal restoration appeal to local authorities. It’s all part of the ‘broaden the appeal’ approach that’s kept Navvies full of stuff that I hope you’ve found interesting during the last year when we’ve had less of our own news to report.

But speaking of our own news, hopefully before too many more issues of Navvies have been published we’ll have some more definite news of the first WRG Canal Camps for over 18 months.