Opening up waterways can help ease London’s traffic congestion

The 21st century shows signs of a new age of freight transport on Britain’s canals and rivers, taking goods off the roads and onto a less congested, ecologically friendlier, mode of transport.

Carrying freight was the whole purpose of the canals 250 years ago, and until the growth of leisure boating after the Second World War. But from 1845 onwards, their traffic began to decline in the face of the faster railways. In the twentieth century road transport became an even tougher competitor with its door-to-door service.

By the end of the Second World War, the decline in canal transport was at a worrying level, and in 1946 the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) was founded to campaign to save the waterways and continue freight transport on them. That is still our purpose today.

What seemed to be the final blow was a desperately cold winter in 1962/63, when the canals froze for three months and most customers switched to road or rail transport, never to return. Large-scale carrying on the canals came to an end. Small quantities of traffic continued in the hands of enthusiasts.

By 1967, the Government adopted the view that the future for most of the canals lay with leisure use.

Freight traffic continued on some of the bigger rivers. Much of the work of the IWA’s Freight Group (formerly the Inland Shipping Group) in recent years has been to preserve and to expand this trade.

In London, the Thames still carries some freight, although not as much as it could. The biggest traffic is London’s rubbish, going down-river to land-fill sites in Essex. Another is bringing sand and gravel into London for the construction trade, mainly to wharves on Deptford Creek and at Fulham.

On the canals, successors of the enthusiasts of the 1960s continue, many of them in the business of selling bagged coal, diesel and bottled gas to boaters. In London this trade is served by narrowboat Indus and the pair Ara & Archimedes.

But there are signs already of a new growth of freight on the canals, and London is to the forefront of it.

A few years ago, a new traffic was launched for the carriage of gravel from a quarry in Denham to a works in West Drayton using a combination of purpose-built motor barges and other craft, one of which, narrowboat Arundel, is here at Canalway Cavalcade.

A study funded by Transport for London showed that with the barge-sized canals we have in and around London, canal transport can compete with roads on trips involving not more than four locks, beyond which a lorry can make two trips in the time that a barge makes one. The first outcome of that was the building of a new wharf at Old Oak Common for a new works where Powerday’s will recycle construction and demolition waste. This is deliberately sited where it can use road, rail and water transport, and the use of barges is central to the scheme.

Meanwhile the use of water transport to service building projects grows. The biggest so far was the huge development of Canary Wharf in Docklands, serviced by barges off the Thames. Currently, contractors Wood, Hall and Heward are carrying construction materials to the large King’s Place development on the Regent’s Canal.

The biggest construction project of all will be the 2012 Olympics in East London, and everybody is keen that as much of that as possible will be serviced by water freight. To make this possible a new lock, Prescott Lock, is being built on the Bow Back Rivers to open to barge traffic what is at present a tidal section of waterway. The new lock will take 350-ton barges and will allow passage from the tidal Bow Creek for 4 to 6 hours per day. Its cost of £18.9 million is being met by a number of organisations, including a contribution of £4m from Transport for London.

There is a growing interest in freight transport on the canals as well, for two reasons. Nationally, and particularly in London, there is an increasing problem of road congestion. Part of the solution to this could and should be the removal of some lorry traffic and its replacement by barge traffic. But water transport is also much friendlier to the environment. It is low-profile - a barge chugs quietly along without the noise and disturbance of the several lorries it replaces. In an energy-conscious age, it uses less fuel. On the water each litre of diesel will carry 127 tonnes of goods a distance of 1 kilometre. On rail, the same fuel could carry only 97 tonnes for the same distance and on the roads only 50 tonnes. So water transport is less hungry for fuel, and as a result less polluting to the atmosphere.

So the potential is there for an increase in transport by canals and rivers to deliver not only goods to their customers, but also a whole range of environmental benefits to society as a whole.

Mike Stevens