Sankey Canal

The Sankey Canal was built principally to transport coal from Haydock Collieries and Parr to the growing chemical industries of Liverpool, although iron ore and corn were important cargoes. The industries rapidly expanded, and spread along the line of the canal to St Helens, Haydock, Newton le Willows and Widnes, which were small villages until this period. The canal was an important factor in the industrial growth of the region.

The line of the canal was surveyed by Henry Berry and William Taylor, for which they charged £66. Berry, who had previously worked with Thomas Steers, Liverpool’s first dock engineer, on the Newry Canal in Northern Ireland, was Liverpool’s second dock engineer, but was appointed engineer for the navigation when the promoters convinced the Dock Trustees to release him for two days a week. It is not known whether Berry or the promoters presented the plans to parliament as an upgrade to the river navigation, despite building it as a true canal, but it is thought to be the only time a canal was authorised by parliament without anyone petitioning against it.[4]

The Act of Parliament authorising the construction of the navigation was passed on 20 March 1755, and was entitled An Act for making navigable the River or Brook called Sankey Brook, and Three several Branches thereof from the River Mersey below Sankey Bridges, up to Boardman's Stone Bridge on the South Branch, to Gerrard's Bridge on the Middle Branch, and to Penny Bridge on the North Branch, all in the county palatine of Lancaster.[5] The canal was open and carrying coal by 1757;[6] carriage of all goods was charged at a flat rate of 10d (ten old pence – £0.04) per ton.[5]

As the title of the Act states, in addition to the mainline between the Mersey and Parr, three branches were built to nearby collieries: the South Branch to Boardman's Stone Bridge, Parr; the Middle Branch to Gerrard's Bridge; and the North Branch to Penny Bridge.

A second Act of Parliament was obtained on 8 April 1762, amending the earlier act, and was entitled An Act to amend and render more effectual, an Act made in the Twenty-eighth Year of the Reign of his late Majesty King George the Second, for making navigable Sankey Brook, in the county of Lancaster, and for the extending and improving the said Navigation. This authorised the extension of the navigation to Fiddler's Ferry on the River Mersey, and to take an additional toll of two-pence per ton, making the rate one shilling (£0.05) per ton.[7] The line of this extension was surveyed by John Eyes, who acted as principal witness to see the bill through parliament.[8]

An early trial of steam power took place[7] on 16 June 1797, when, according to the Billing's Liverpool Advertiser, dated 26 June, John Smith's "vessel heavily laden with copper slag, passed along the Sankey Canal ... by the application of steam only ... it appears, that the vessel after a course of 10 miles [16 km], returned the same evening to St Helens whence it had set out". The boat was powered by a Newcomen engine working a paddle crankshaft through a beam and connecting rod.

To counter competition from the new railways, another extension was planned from Fiddler's Ferry across Cuerdley and Widnes Salt Marshes to Widnes Wharf, on the west bank of the River Mersey near Runcorn Gap, creating a second connection to the Mersey and another basin. This was authorised by a third Act of Parliament, granted on 29 May 1830, entitled An Act to consolidate and amend the Acts relating to the Sankey Brook Navigation, in the county of Lancaster; and to make a New Canal from the said Navigation at Fidler's Ferry, to communicate with the River Mersey at Widness Wharf, near West Bank, in the township of Widnes, in the said county,' repeals the former acts of the 28th George II. and 2nd George III. and incorporates the proprietors under the title of "The Company of Proprietors of the Sankey Brook Navigation."[9] Francis Giles was appointed engineer for this extension, which opened in 1833. In 1825 Giles, who was a pupil of John Rennie and involved in many canal projects of the period, had proposed a link from the Sankey, via an aqueduct across the Mersey, to the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, but this was never implemented.[10]

The Sankey Viaduct

The Sankey Canal was built for Mersey Flats, the common sailing craft of the local rivers; they were used on the Mersey, Irwell and Weaver and along the Lancashire and North Wales coasts. To allow for the masts of the flats, swing bridges were constructed where roads crossed the canal. When the railways were built, they too had to cross in similar fashion. The exception was near the newly built town in Newton-Le-Willows that was to become Earlestown, where George Stephenson erected the Sankey Viaduct for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, leaving 70-foot (21 m) headroom for the flats' sails. It is unclear how the flats' masts were accommodated at Great Sankey, where the Liverpool–Warrington–Manchester line built by the Cheshire Lines Committee in 1873 crosses the Sankey on a 12-arch viaduct less than twenty feet above the water level of the canal.

In 1877, it was reportedly the case that, due to the pollution of a local Leblanc alkali works, "The mud deposited in the Sankey Brook, near St Helens, has been found to contain no less than 2.26 percent of arsenic...The water of the Sankey Brook is so acid that iron fittings cannot safely be used in the barges and lock gates."[11] Reportedly, by 1891, 500 acres (2.0 km²) of nearby Widnes and Ditton Marshes were buried under an average depth of 12 feet (3.7 m) of toxic galligu from alkali operations near the Sankey Canal. The galligu detritus was estimated at 10 million tonnes in total weight.[12] It is unknown what level of pollution exists in said brook as of 2009, though galligu, soap and ash waste have been reported in the vicinity. In the present, discoveries of arsenic, lead and mercury have been found as common contaminants in the soil of local gardens.[13] On top of this, St Michael’s Golf Course, a municipal golf course in nearby Widnes built atop "30 hectares of land from old chemical waste tips", was forced to close due to high levels of arsenic found in the soil, that created a public hazard.[14]

A staircase lock was built on the Sankey Canal and a second staircase was built later when the Ravenhead Branch was constructed in 1775. They are known respectively as the Old Double Lock and the New Double Lock. The latter was restored by St Helens Borough Council[15] in 1992, although it has no navigable waterway either above or below it.

Built primarily to take coal from Haydock and Parr down to the Mersey and so on to the saltfields of Cheshire and Liverpool, the final traffic on the Sankey Canal was very different, and in the opposite direction, consisting of raw sugar for the Sankey Sugar Works at Earlestown, Newton-le-Willows, from Liverpool.

The seal of St Helens Canal and Railway Company

The canal’s immediate commercial success, followed soon after by that of the Bridgewater Canal, led to a mania of canal building, and for further extension schemes to be proposed for the Sankey Canal. Francis Giles' proposal to link the canal to the Bridgwater Canal was not implemented, and neither was a plan to link the canal to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal near Leigh, to the North-East. Apart from the early extension to Fiddlers Ferry, which provided better access to the River Mersey, and the 1775 extension to St Helens, the only major change came with the extension to Widnes in the 1830s.

In 1845 the St Helens and Runcorn Gap Railway Company and the then more prosperous Canal Company merged to form the St Helens Canal and Railway Company.[6] Its occasionally used name is the St Helens Canal.

The ending of the sugar traffic in 1959 led to the closure of the canal in 1963.[6] North of the sugar works, closure had taken place in 1931,[6] and fixed bridges quickly replaced the old wooden swing bridges. The canal, however, remains largely in water right up into the centre of St Helens, although its terminus had been truncated in 1898, when Canal Street was built over it.

Restoration of the canal began in 1980, when work began on the section between Bewsey and Liverpool Road, Great Sankey, funded by a Derelict Land Grant.[16] Most of the canal is still in water and much has been restored to navigable standard, with short sections at Fiddlers Ferry, Warrington and Spike Island, Widnes having locks into the Mersey which have allowed craft access to the canal for mooring since the locks were restored in the 1980s.[15] However, fixed bridges which replaced the original wooden swing bridges and other obstructions isolate the sections from one another. The route of the canal passes through the Sankey Valley Park and the towpath from Sankey Bridges to Widnes now forms part of the Trans Pennine Trail.[17]

There are plans to restore the canal, and perhaps to extend it northwards to join the main canal system via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The total cost of this would be in excess of £100m and it is therefore a long-term project. There are, however, plans to dig out an infilled section in the centre of St Helens as part of the town's Eastside development. A feasibility study for this work was funded by a grant from the Single Regeneration Budget Fund, while at the other end of the canal, the Widnes Waterfront plan, published by Halton Council,[18] and the new Mersey crossing between Widnes and Runcorn were expected to lead to further restoration at Widnes.

The section of the Sankey Canal running from St Helens to Newton le Willows is expected to be most difficult to restore, and is likely to involve the laying of a complete new canal bed, and one major obstacle is that the canal is severed by the dual carriageway A57 in Warrington.

• Canals of the United Kingdom
• History of the British canal system

• Sankey Canal Restoration Society