Editor Camp reports and a pair of arms Camp reports They’re back! Reporting

editor A tale of two arms...

Martin receives the first big batch of canal camp reports since 2019, and compares important achievements on two arms of the Grand Union Canal...

The return of Canal Camps

This issue marks the return of a feature that has been largely missing from Navvies for much of the last two and a half years – the WRG Canal Camp report.

In 2020 the pandemic knocked out the entire summer programme of week-long camps (and much of the regional groups’ work too). In 2021 a short series of ‘trial camps’ tested our plans for working under new Covid-related procedures. But this year we finally returned with a full (if somewhat shorter than usual) summer programme. And the selection of reports in this issue show the results achieved by the first half of that programme.

My thanks to those who sent in the reports (and the pictures to go with them), who I reckon have done a good job of reporting back on a pretty successful programme of work in an interesting and entertaining way, as well as covering the less strictly work-related aspects of the week.

Those ‘less work-related’ matters included everything from an unusual evening entertainment star-gazing in an observatory with a local amateur astronomical group (See picture) to outings canoeing, paddleboarding and building home-made rockets – plus, less happily, in one case having to cope with a Covid outbreak on camp. No, we don’t just give you the good news in Navvies, we try to tell it ‘warts and all’.

But as you’ll see, it wasn’t entirely bad news the plans we’d made in anticipation of the possibility of this happening were followed, the team dealt with it and brought the camp to an orderly early close, and the subsequent camps on the same site (and elsewhere) were able to take place without any more such problems. There are, as we go to press, several more camps either in progress or still to come. Please send your reports and photographs in so we can include them in the next issue. Thank you. A call to Arms What do the Wendover Arm and the Buckingham Arm have in common? Well firstly and most obviously, they’re both arms of the Grand Union Canal, which (until they fell into disuse) used to link its main line to… surprise surprise… Wendover and Buckingham respectively. But secondly and very importantly as far as Navvies is concerned, they’ve both had some very good news as regards dealing with what have seemed at times to be intractable problems facing restoration plans. Dealing first with the Wendover Arm, the Wendover Canal Trust’s team have been hard at work since 2005 on what’s known as the ‘Phase 2’ section, completely rebuilding the channel (the original canal would never hold water owing to the porous chalk soil it passes through) from Aston Clinton back to Tringford. There it will meet up with the ‘Phase 2’ section, already restored and navigable from the Grand Union Main Line at Bulbourne. But in between them is a short infilled section of canal, and this was proving rather a headache for BCS, as it turned out “...to boldly go where no WRGie has gone before”

that what had been thought to be harmless infill was in fact classed as toxic (it was 100year-old rubbish, with a lot of ashes and a little lead in it, I gather). And the cost of removing it to a specialist tip was not only beyond BCS’s means, but led to them having to withdraw a Lottery funding bid which had been provisionally approved. But now, Dacorum Borough Council and Tring Council have agreed to provide a total of £155,000 to remove 5,500 cubic metres of infill so that the restoration can proceed.

And secondly the Buckingham Arm. Its ‘intractable’ problem was a road crossing, In the 1970s during the establishment of Milton Keynes new town, a long section of the A5 trunk road was replaced by a new road on a new alignment which cut through the canal more-or-less at water level, just over a mile from its junction with the Grand Union Main Line at Cosgrove, with no obvious way of getting around it. And however much good progress Buckingham Canal Society made on the canal’s restoration at Cosgrove, at the Buckingham end, or at the various other sites they’ve worked on, there was always this “Yes, but what about the A5?” question hanging over it.

More recently BCS came out with a possible workaround – a major diversion away from the original route, dropping down by a couple of new locks to pass under the A5 using the northernmost span of the viaduct which carries the road over the Great Ouse river. At some point beyond the road crossing it would then climb through two more new locks to rejoin the original route beyond Deanshanger. That would be expensive - and beyond BCS’s means to fund in the foreseeable future? Perhaps. But then they went

to National Highways (formerly Highways England, and before that the Highways Agency), who you may remember came up with £4m to reinstate the Cotswold Canals under the A38 roundabout near Whitminster, Gloucestershire, from a specific pot of money which had been set up to put right environmental damage that had been caused by new road schemes in the past. And although NH haven’t actually come up with the cash to create the concrete open culvert to carry the canal under the A5 just yet, they’ve taken the first big step towards it with internal approval and funding to proceed with the first stage of their feasibility study work. Fingers crossed that it will go all the way. And the third thing that the Wendover and Buckingham have in common is (as some of you probably guessed I’d say!) that they’ve both been the scene of a great deal of volunteer work over the years – largely by their own dedicated teams but well supported by visitors: WRG Canal Camps, regional groups including London and BITM, and our friends in KESCRG. And without that volunteer input they’d probably never have reached the point where outside funders would be convinced of the value of putting up the cash towards solving their ‘intractable’ problems. See you on a worksite sometime! Martin Ludgate Hope of becoming a reality: impression of Buckingham Canal / A5 crossing page 7