Canals of the United Kingdom

Last updated April 26, 2024

The canals of the United Kingdom are a major part of the network of inland waterways in the United Kingdom. They have a varied history, from use for irrigation and transport, through becoming the focus of the Industrial Revolution, to today's role of recreational boating. Despite a period of abandonment, today the canal system in the United Kingdom is again increasing in use, with abandoned and derelict canals being reopened, and the construction of some new routes. Canals in England and Wales are maintained by navigation authorities. The biggest navigation authorities are the Canal & River Trust and the Environment Agency, but other canals are managed by companies, local authorities or charitable trusts.

The majority of canals in the United Kingdom can accommodate boats with a length of between 55 and 72 feet (17 and 22 m) and are now used primarily for leisure. There are a number of canals which are far larger than this, including New Junction Canal and the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, which can accommodate boats with a length of up to 230 feet (70 m). An incomparable purpose-built ship canal is the Manchester Ship Canal.^[1] Upon opening in 1894, it was the largest ship canal in the world,^[2] permitting ships with a length of up to 600 feet (183 m) to navigate its 36-mile (58 km) route.

History of commercial carrying

Canals first saw use during the Roman occupation of the south of Great Britain and were used mainly for irrigation. The Romans also created several navigable canals, such as Foss Dyke, to link rivers, enabling increased transport inland by water.^[3]

The United Kingdom's navigable water network grew as the demand for industrial transport increased. The canals were key to the pace of the Industrial Revolution: roads at the time were unsuitable for large volumes of traffic. A system of very large pack horse trains had developed, but few roads were suitable for wheeled vehicles able to transport large amounts of materials (especially fragile manufactured goods such as pottery) quickly. Canal boats were much quicker, could carry large volumes, and were much safer for fragile items. Following the success of first the Sankey Canal followed by the Bridgewater Canal, other canals were constructed between industrial centres, cities and ports, and were soon transporting raw materials (particularly coal and lumber) and manufactured goods. There were immediate benefits to households, as well as to commerce: in Manchester, the cost of coal fell by 75% when the Bridgewater Canal arrived.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold in the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the technology allowed canals to be improved. The early canals contoured round hills and valleys, later ones went straighter. Locks took canals up and down hills, and they strode across valleys on taller and longer aqueducts and through hills in longer and deeper tunnels.

From the mid-19th century, railways began to replace canals, especially those built with the standard narrow (7 ft [2.1 m]) bridges and locks. As trains, and later road vehicles, became more advanced, they became cheaper than the narrow canal system, being faster, and able to carry much larger cargoes. The canal network declined, and many canals were bought by railway companies – in some cases to enable them to penetrate rival companies' areas transhipping to/from canal boats. Some narrow canals became unusable, filled with weeds, silt and rubbish, or were converted to railways.

There was a late burst of wide-waterway building (e.g. the Caledonian Canal, and the Manchester Ship Canal), and of invention and innovation by people such as Bartholomew of the Aire and Calder company, who conceived the trains of nineteen coal-filled "Tom Pudding" compartment boats that were pulled along the Aire and Calder Navigation from the Yorkshire coalfields, then lifted bodily to upturn their contents directly into seagoing colliers at Goole Docks (their descendants, Hargreaves' tugs pushing three coal-pans trains to be upended into hoppers at the Aire power stations lasted as late as 2004). However, the last new canal before the end of the 20th century was the New Junction Canal in Yorkshire (now South Yorkshire) in 1905. As competition intensified, horse-drawn single narrowboats were replaced by steam and later diesel powered boats towing an unpowered butty, and many of the boatmen's families abandoned their shore homes for a life afloat, to help with boat handling and to reduce accommodation costs – the birth of the legendary "boatman's cabin" with bright white lace, gleaming brass and gaily-painted metalware. A trip on the canal system was described colloquially as "a cruise on the cut".

Constant lowering of tolls meant that the carriage of some bulky, non-perishable, and non-vital goods by water was still feasible on some inland waterways – but the death knell for commercial carrying on the narrow canals was sounded in the winter of 1962–63, when a long hard frost kept goods icebound on the canals for three months. A few of the remaining customers turned to road and rail haulage to ensure reliability of supply and never returned, though both rail and road had been severely disrupted by the frost and snow too. Other narrowboat traffic gradually ceased with the change from coal to oil, the closure of canalside factories, and run-down of British heavy industry. The last long-distance narrowboat traffics, coal from the Midlands to Dickinson's paper mills at Croxley and the Kearley and Tonge jam factory at Southall both ceased in 1970 – the Croxley mills had changed to oil and the jam factory closed for re-location. Regular narrowboat traffics continued, such as lime juice from Brentford to Boxmoor (until 1981) while aggregates were carried on the River Soar until 1988.

Some individual waterways (especially the Manchester Ship Canal, the Aire & Calder Navigation and the other large waterways) remain viable, carrying many millions of tonnes per year and there are still hopes for development, but containerisation of ports and lorries has mostly passed the waterways by. The last major investment development of the inland waterways was the enlargement of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation in the early 1980s to cope with barges of standard European dimensions that (in the depression of the 80s) never came. The scale of the futile hopes of those days can be appreciated by the occupants of a holiday narrowboat nearly lost in a lock built for the barges that were going to sail down the Rhine, across the North Sea aboard a ship, and up to Doncaster. Today there have been a number of successful initiatives to get more traffic on to the larger inland waterways, though even the Manchester Ship Canal does not convey cargo ships to the docks in Salford, which have become little more than a water feature for the apartments, offices and cultural institutions of 'Salford Quays' that have replaced the wharves and warehouses.^{[ citation needed ]}

Growth of leisure use

Early use of the canals for leisure travel was fairly limited. One of the earliest records of pleasure cruising was published in 1891.Two Girls on a Barge by Miss V. Cecil Cotes describes an unconventional adventure by two young ladies who took a barge from Paddington to Coventry.^[4] With the introduction of motor boats, George Westall authored a book in 1908, Inland Cruising on the Rivers and Canals of England and Wales which was published by Lander, Westall and Co.^[5] In 1916, P Bonthron published My Holidays on Inland Waterways which described his adventures covering 2,000 miles of inland waterways in his motor boat.^[6]

In the latter half of the 20th century, while the use of canals for transporting goods was dying out, there was a rise in interest in their history and potential use for leisure. A large amount of credit for this is usually given to L. T. C. Rolt, whose book Narrow Boat about a journey made in the narrowboat Cressy was published in 1944.^[7] A key development was the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association, and the establishment of fledgling weekly boat-hire companies, following the example of such companies on the Norfolk Broads, which had long been used for leisure boating. The authority responsible for the canals, the British Waterways Board, encouraged this process from the late 1950s by operating a fleet of holiday hire boats, initially converted from cut-down working boats.

Holidaymakers began renting 'narrowboats' and roaming the canals, visiting towns and villages they passed. Richer people bought boats to use for weekend breaks and the occasional longer trip. The concept of a canal holiday became even more familiar when the large agencies that dealt with Broads holidays began to include canal boatyards in their brochures. Canal-based holidays became popular due to their relaxing nature, self-catering levels of cost, and variety of scenery available; from inner London to the Scottish Highlands. This growth in interest came just in time to give local canal societies the ammunition they needed to combat government proposals in the 1960s to close commercially unviable canals, and to resist pressure from local authorities and newspapers to "fill in this eyesore" or even to "close the killer canal" (when someone fell in one). It was not long before enthusiastic volunteers were repairing unnavigable but officially open canals and moving on to restore officially closed ones and demonstrating their renewed viability to the authorities.

Local authorities began to see how a cleaned-up and well-used waterway was bringing visitors to other towns and waterside pubs – not just boaters, but people who just like being near water and watching boats (see gongoozler). They began to clean up their own watersides, and to campaign for "their" canal to be restored. As a result of this growing revival of interest, for the first time in a century some new routes have been constructed (the Ribble Link and the Liverpool Canal Link), another is under construction (the Fens Waterways Link). Large projects such as the restoration of the Anderton Boat Lift, or the building of the Falkirk Wheel attracted development funding from the European Union and from the Millennium Fund. The Rochdale Canal, the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and the Droitwich Canals have all been restored to navigation since 2000.

The Oxford Canal near Rugby
The Kennet and Avon Canal near the Dundas Aqueduct, Wiltshire
Bridge over Birmingham Canal Old Main Line in downtown Birmingham

Present status

There are now about 4,700 miles (7,600 km) of navigable canals and rivers throughout the United Kingdom; 2,700 miles (4,345 km) of these are part of the connected system.^[8] Most of them are linked into a single English and Welsh network from Bristol to London, Liverpool to Goole and Lancaster to Ripon, and connecting the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the estuaries of the Humber, Thames, Mersey, Severn and Ribble. This network is navigable in its entirety by a narrowboat (a boat 7 ft [2.1 m] wide) no longer than about 56 ft (17 m).^{[ citation needed ]} There are also several through-routes not connected to the main network, notably those in Scotland, e.g., Glasgow to Edinburgh via the Forth and Clyde Canal, the Falkirk Wheel, and the Union Canal; and Fort William to Inverness via the Caledonian Canal (including Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, and Loch Ness).

There are four separate sections of the inland canal network accessible to wide or broad-beam boats of around 12.6 ft [3.8 m] wide (though two each are linked by tidal waterways). However, long-term proposed and already underway restorations and constructions of new routes would eventually link these sections, enabling wide boats to move freely between them and create a true north–south east–west network.^[9]

The aim of campaigning bodies such as the Inland Waterways Association is to protect the existing waterways and help restore once-navigable waterways. In May 2005, it was reported that British Waterways (the predecessor to the Canal & River Trust) was hoping to quadruple the amount of cargo carried on Britain's canal network to six million tonnes by 2010 by transporting large amounts of waste to disposal facilities.^{[ citation needed ]}

The speed limit for the majority of inland waterways in the United Kingdom managed by the Canal & River Trust is 4 mph (6.4 km/h).^[10] All speed measurements on Canal & River Trust waterways are expressed in terms of speed over the ground, rather than speed through the water.

List of canals

Canal features

Aqueducts

Canal aqueducts are structures that carry a canal across a valley, road, railway, or another canal. Dundas Aqueduct is built of stone in a classical style. Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is an iron trough on tall stone piers. Barton Swing Aqueduct opens to let ships pass underneath on the Manchester Ship Canal. Three Bridges, London is an arrangement allowing the routes of the Grand Junction Canal, a road, and a railway line to cross each other.

Boat lifts

Inclined planes

Locks

Locks are the most common means of raising or lowering a boat from one water level to another. The distinguishing feature of a lock is a fixed chamber whose water-level can be changed.

Where a large height difference has to be overcome, locks are built close together in a flight such as at Caen Hill Locks. Where the gradient is very steep, a set of staircase locks are sometimes used, like Bingley Five Rise Locks. At the other extreme stop locks have little or no change in level but were built to conserve water where one canal joined another. An interesting example is King's Norton Stop Lock which was built with guillotine gates.

Tunnels

Canal boats

Bastard boats or Statters (12' / 3.65 m beam; wide boats on Manchester, Bolton & Bury)
Broad-beam boats (called "wide boats" on the Grand Union canal, 2.2 m to 4.3 m beam)
Cabin Cruisers
Fly-boats (long and short; on the Aire and Calder Navigation)
Keels (on Aire and Calder Navigation)
Long boats (narrow boats used on the River Severn)
Mersey Flat, a doubled-ended, fully decked carvel-built barge that worked canals in NW England.
Narrowboats or Narrow Boats (nominally 6 feet 10 inches (2.08 m) beam); originally working boats on Midlands canals; now mostly pleasure boats)
Severners (used on the River Severn)
Severn Trow used on the River Severn and made for the Stroudwater Navigation (Costwold Canal Trust)
Short boats (on Northern canals such as Leeds & Liverpool, Calder & Hebble, Aire and Calder Navigation)
Stort boats – used on the Stort Navigation, with a 13 feet 3 inches (4.04 m) beam
Sloops (on Aire and Calder Navigation)
Starvationers used in the Worsley Navigable Levels and the Bridgewater Canal.
Tom Pudding coal tubs used on the Aire and Calder Navigation and other canals in the South Yorkshire Coalfield.
Trench boats (for 6' / 1.83 m locks on the Trench, Telford Arm of the Shrewsbury Canal)
Tub boats (used on various canals including the Bude Canal and the Grand Western Canal)
White boats (on Aire and Calder Navigation; with white side decks for working at night)
Widebeams; canal boats more than 6 feet 10 inches (2.08 m) beam

Canal museums

National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port, Merseyside
Foxton Canal Museum, Harborough, Leicestershire
Galton Valley Canal Heritage Centre, Smethwick, West Midlands
Gloucester Waterways Museum
Kennet & Avon Canal Museum, Devizes, Wiltshire
Linlithgow Canal Centre, Scotland
Llangollen Canal Museum, North Wales
London Canal Museum, Kings Cross, London
Portland Basin Museum, Manchester
Stoke Bruerne Canal Museum, Northamptonshire
Tapton Lock Visitor Centre, Chesterfield
Yorkshire Waterways Museum, Goole, East Yorkshire
Standedge Canal Tunnel Visitors Centre and Museum, Marsden, Yorkshire

Canal archives

The Canals Collection at the Cadbury Research Library (University of Birmingham) contains archive materials relating to Midlands canals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^[11]

Canal engineers

Related Research Articles

Barge often refers to a flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel which does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion. The first modern barges were pulled by tugs, but on inland waterways, most are pushed by pusher boats, or other vessels. The term barge has a rich history, and therefore there are many other types of barges.

Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management or for conveyancing water transport vehicles. They carry free, calm surface flow under atmospheric pressure, and can be thought of as artificial rivers.

The Grand Union Canal in England is part of the British canal system. It is the principal navigable waterway between London and the Midlands. Starting in London, one arm runs to Leicester and another ends in Birmingham, with the latter stretching for 137 miles (220 km) with 166 locks from London. The Birmingham line has a number of short branches to places including Slough, Aylesbury, Wendover, and Northampton. The Leicester line has two short arms of its own, to Market Harborough and Welford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British Waterways</span> Canal and inland waterway authority

British Waterways, often shortened to BW, was a statutory corporation wholly owned by the government of the United Kingdom. It served as the navigation authority for the majority of canals and a number of rivers and docks in England, Scotland and Wales.

A narrowboat is a particular type of canal boat, built to fit the narrow locks of the United Kingdom. The UK's canal system provided a nationwide transport network during the Industrial Revolution, but with the advent of the railways, commercial canal traffic gradually diminished and the last regular long-distance transportation of goods by canal had virtually disappeared by 1970. However, some commercial traffic continued. From the 1970s onward narrowboats were gradually being converted into permanent residences or as holiday lettings. Currently, about 8580 narrowboats are registered as 'permanent homes' on Britain's waterway system and represent a growing alternative community living on semi-permanent moorings or continuously cruising.

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal is a canal in Northern England, linking the cities of Leeds and Liverpool.

The Calder and Hebble Navigation is a broad inland waterway, with locks and bridgeholes that are suitable for 14-foot-wide (4.3 m) boats, in West Yorkshire, England. Construction to improve the River Calder and the River Hebble began in 1759, and the initial scheme, which included 5.7 miles (9.2 km) of new cuts, was completed in 1770 and has remained navigable since it was opened. Significant improvements were made, including the Salterhebble branch to Halifax, opened in 1828, and ever-longer cuts to bypass river sections. Trade was assisted by the opening of the Rochdale Canal in 1804, which provided a through route from Sowerby Bridge to Manchester. There were plans to abandon the river sections completely in the 1830s, but these were modified as the needs of mill owners and other riparian landowners were recognised.

The Aire and Calder Navigation is the canalised section of the Rivers Aire and Calder in West Yorkshire, England. The first improvements to the rivers above Knottingley were completed in 1704 when the Aire was made navigable to Leeds and the Calder to Wakefield, by the construction of 16 locks. Lock sizes were increased several times, as was the depth of water, to enable larger boats to use the system. The Aire below Haddlesey was bypassed by the opening of the Selby Canal in 1778. A canal from Knottingley to the new docks and new town at Goole provided a much shorter route to the River Ouse from 1826. The New Junction Canal was constructed in 1905, to link the system to the River Don Navigation, by then part of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation.

The Trent and Mersey Canal is a 93+1⁄2-mile (150 km) canal in Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire in north-central England. It is a "narrow canal" for the vast majority of its length, but at the extremities to the east of Burton upon Trent and north of Middlewich, it is a wide canal.

The Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation (S&SY) is a system of navigable inland waterways in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, England.

The canal network of the United Kingdom played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution. The UK was the first country to develop a nationwide canal network which, at its peak, expanded to nearly 4,000 miles in length. The canals allowed raw materials to be transported to a place of manufacture, and finished goods to be transported to consumers, more quickly and cheaply than by a land based route. The canal network was extensive and included feats of civil engineering such as the Anderton Boat Lift, the Manchester Ship Canal, the Worsley Navigable Levels and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.

The Barnsley Canal is a canal that ran from Barnby Basin, through Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England, to a junction with the Aire and Calder Navigation near Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It was built in the 1790s, to provide a transport link from coal reserves at Barnsley to a wider market. Both the Aire and Calder Navigation and the River Don Navigation took a keen interest in the project, the former buying many of the initial shares, and the latter constructing the Dearne and Dove Canal to link the canal to their waterway. Water supply issues meant that the Aire and Calder proposed pumping all of the water for the canal from the River Calder, using steam pumps, but a reservoir was built at Cold Hiendley instead, increasing the construction costs, but reducing the running costs. The canal as built was 14.5 miles (23.3 km) long and included 15 locks.

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal is an inland waterway in northern England. It runs just under 20 miles (32 km) from Lock 1E at the rear of the University of Huddersfield campus, near Aspley Basin in Huddersfield, to the junction with the Ashton Canal at Whitelands Basin in Ashton-under-Lyne. It crosses the Pennines by means of 74 locks and the Standedge Tunnel.

The Huddersfield Broad Canal or Sir John Ramsden's Canal, is a wide-locked navigable canal in West Yorkshire in northern England. The waterway is 3.75 miles (6 km) long and has 9 wide locks. It follows the valley of the River Colne and connects the Calder and Hebble Navigation at Cooper Bridge junction with the Huddersfield Narrow Canal near Aspley Basin in Huddersfield.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Junction Canal</span> Canal in South Yorkshire, England

The New Junction Canal is a canal in South Yorkshire, England. It is part of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation (S&SYN), although it was jointly funded by the Aire and Calder Navigation, and was opened in 1905. It links the River Don Navigation and the Stainforth and Keadby Canal with the Aire and Calder Navigation. It is completely straight, and was the last canal built in England for commercial purposes.

The Selby Canal is a 6-mile (9.7 km) canal with 2 locks which bypasses the lower reaches of the River Aire in Yorkshire, England, from the village of West Haddlesey to the town of Selby where it joins the River Ouse. It opened in 1778, and provided the main outlet for the Aire and Calder Navigation until 1826, when it was bypassed by a new cut from Ferrybridge to Goole. Selby steadily declined after that, although traffic to York still used the canal.

The North Pennine Ring is a canal ring which crosses the Pennines between Manchester, Leeds and Castleford. It follows parts of five canals, and shares much of its route with the Outer Pennine Ring, which uses a different route for the southern crossing of the Pennines.

The Outer Pennine Ring is an English canal ring which crosses the Pennines between Manchester, Leeds and Castleford. Its route follows parts of eight canals, and includes the longest canal tunnel in England. The ring was completed in 2001, with the opening of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. Much of the route is shared with the North Pennine Ring, which crosses the Pennines by a different route on the southern leg.

References

↑ "Manchester Ship Canal". waterscape.com. British Waterways . Retrieved 3 February 2012. the Manchester Ship Canal, nicknamed 'The Big Ditch', runs for 36 miles (58 km). Britain's biggest waterway, its size, construction methods and operations make it incomparable with any other inland waterway in the country.
↑ "1 January 1894: Opening of the Manchester ship canal". The Guardian. 17 May 2011. Retrieved 13 March 2012. Six years in the making, the world's largest navigation canal gives the city direct access to the sea
↑ Hadfield, Charles (1974). British Canals An Illustrated history (Fifth ed.). Newton Abbot: David & Charles. p. 28. ISBN 0-7153-4863-9.
↑ "Pilgrims in Petticoats" . National Observer. England. 5 September 1891. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.
↑ "Cruising and Canals" . Globe. England. 24 August 1908. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.
↑ "My Holidays on Inland Waterways" . Richmond and Twickenham Times. England. 6 May 1916. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.
↑ "Towpath and Riverside" . The Scotsman. Scotland. 7 December 1944. Retrieved 2 August 2020– via British Newspaper Archive.
↑ "Inland Waterways Association". Waterways.org.uk. Retrieved 11 November 2020.
↑ "Far and wide? | Canal Boat". 9 April 2014.
↑ Canal & River Trust (2019). The Boater's Handbook (PDF). p. 57. ISBN 978-0-9556339-6-6 . Retrieved 3 November 2020.
↑ "UoB Calmview5: Search results". calmview.bham.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2020.

External links

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[1] "Manchester Ship Canal". waterscape.com. British Waterways . Retrieved 3 February 2012. the Manchester Ship Canal, nicknamed 'The Big Ditch', runs for 36 miles (58 km). Britain's biggest waterway, its size, construction methods and operations make it incomparable with any other inland waterway in the country.

[2] "1 January 1894: Opening of the Manchester ship canal". The Guardian. 17 May 2011. Retrieved 13 March 2012. Six years in the making, the world's largest navigation canal gives the city direct access to the sea

[bcch28-3] Hadfield, Charles (1974). British Canals An Illustrated history (Fifth ed.). Newton Abbot: David & Charles. p. 28. ISBN 0-7153-4863-9.

[4] "Pilgrims in Petticoats" . National Observer. England. 5 September 1891. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.

[5] "Cruising and Canals" . Globe. England. 24 August 1908. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.

[6] "My Holidays on Inland Waterways" . Richmond and Twickenham Times. England. 6 May 1916. Retrieved 23 April 2024– via British Newspaper Archive.

[7] "Towpath and Riverside" . The Scotsman. Scotland. 7 December 1944. Retrieved 2 August 2020– via British Newspaper Archive.

[8] "Inland Waterways Association". Waterways.org.uk. Retrieved 11 November 2020.

[9] "Far and wide? | Canal Boat". 9 April 2014.

[10] Canal & River Trust (2019). The Boater's Handbook (PDF). p. 57. ISBN 978-0-9556339-6-6 . Retrieved 3 November 2020.

[11] "UoB Calmview5: Search results". calmview.bham.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2020.

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v t e Navigable canals of the United Kingdom
England	Aire and Calder ¹ Ashby-de-la-Zouch ² Ashton Basingstoke Canal Beverley Beck Birmingham Canal Navigations ³ Bridgewater Bridgwater and Taunton Buckingham Arm ² Bude ² Calder and Hebble ¹ Cambridgeshire Lodes ³ Chelmer and Blackwater ¹ Chesterfield ² Chichester ² Coventry Driffield Droitwich Erewash Foss Dyke Gloucester and Sharpness Grand Union ³ Grand Western ² Grantham ² Herefordshire and Gloucestershire ² Hollinwood Branch ² Huddersfield Broad Huddersfield Narrow Ipswich and Stowmarket ¹² Kennet and Avon ¹ Lancaster ² Leeds and Liverpool ³ Lee Navigation ¹ Limehouse Llangollen Lydney Macclesfield Maidenhead Waterways Manchester Bolton & Bury ² Manchester Ship Canal Market Weighton ² Middle Level Navigations ³ Montgomery ² North Walsham & Dilham ¹² Nottingham ² Oxford ¹ Peak Forest Pocklington ² Regent's Canal Ribble Link ¹ Ripon Rochdale Royal Military Canal Sankey ² Selby Sheffield and South Yorkshire ¹³ Shropshire Union ³ Sleaford ¹² South Forty-Foot Drain Staffordshire and Worcestershire Stort ¹ Stourbridge Stratford-upon-Avon Stroudwater ² Thames and Medway ² Thames and Severn ² Trent and Mersey ³ Weaver ¹ Wey and Arun ² Wey and Godalming ¹ Wilts & Berks ² Witham Navigable Drains ³ Worcester and Birmingham
Northern Ireland	Coalisland Canal Lagan Canal Newry Canal Shannon–Erne Waterway Strabane Canal Ulster Canal
Scotland	Caledonian Canal ¹ Crinan Canal Forth and Clyde Union Canal
Wales	Llangollen Canal Monmouthshire and Brecon ² Montgomery Canal ² Neath and Tennant ² Swansea Canal ²
Features	Aqueducts (list) Basins Locks Rings Tunnels (list) Winding holes
Related topics	British Waterways Canal & River Trust Scottish Canals History of the British canal system Manchester Pusher Narrowboats National Waterways Museum Navigable aqueduct Waterways Ireland
Notes: ¹ Contains canalised river. ² Partly or mostly navigable, and/or under restoration. ³ A system of canals. Canals which form part of this system are not listed here individually.