Manchester Ship Canal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Manchester Ship Canal stretches 36 miles through the North West of England, connecting the city of Manchester directly to the Irish Sea. It was, when it opened in January 1894, the largest river navigation canal in the world. That a landlocked industrial city could transform itself into one of Britain's busiest ports is a story of economic desperation, political cunning, and engineering ambition on a scale that staggers the imagination. How did a city 40 miles from the coast come to build a waterway capable of receiving ocean-going vessels? Who paid for it, who fought against it, and what happened when the ships finally arrived? The canal's story reaches from a single meeting at a private home in Didsbury all the way to a 21st-century plan to move 100,000 containers a year through the heart of England.

• 2. Desperation and Vision

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  In 1882 the old Mersey and Irwell Navigation was described as "hopelessly choked with silt and filth", closed to all but the smallest boats for 264 out of 311 working days. Manchester's manufacturers were furious. The charges levied by Liverpool's docks and the railway companies connecting the two cities were seen as extortionate; it was often cheaper to import goods from Hull, on the opposite side of the country, than from Liverpool just 35 miles away. The region was deep in what historians call the Long Depression, and unemployment was grinding the working population down.

  The man who decided to do something about it was Daniel Adamson, a Manchester manufacturer. On the 27th of June 1882 he invited civil engineers, local politicians, and representatives of Lancashire towns to his home, The Towers in Didsbury. Two engineers presented competing visions. Hamilton Fulton proposed a tidal canal with no locks, which would have left Manchester's docks far below street level. Edward Leader Williams offered a more workable solution: dredge a channel between retaining walls, then use a series of locks and sluices to lift ships up to Manchester. Williams' plan was chosen, and the campaign to turn it into law began the same year.

  The proponents' argument was economic and political at once. Reduced transport costs would sharpen local industry's competitive edge. Direct sea access would break Liverpool's grip on import and export charges. And in a city already strained by unemployment, the construction project alone would create thousands of jobs. Historian Ian Harford described the canal as an "imaginative response to problems of depression and unemployment" gripping Manchester in the early 1880s.

• 3. The Fight Through Parliament

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  The campaign to win parliamentary approval lasted three years and required a degree of public mobilisation rarely seen in Victorian England. A provisional committee appointed Joseph Lawrence, who had worked for the Hull and Barnsley Railway, to lead the public effort. The first meeting was held on the 4th of October in Manchester's Oxford Ward; within weeks, gatherings had spread across every ward in Manchester and Salford. A large working-class meeting was held on the 13th of November at the Free Trade Hall, attended by the general secretaries of several trade unions.

  The weekly Ship Canal Gazette, sold for one penny at newsagents across Lancashire, became a platform for the committee's arguments. Leaflets and pamphlets circulated throughout the region, sometimes signed with pseudonyms. One surviving leaflet, titled "The Manchester Ship Canal. Reasons why it Should be Made", argued that railway and dock rates were levied "with the object of protecting the interests of Railway kings, so that trade is handicapped, and wages kept low". By borrowing tactics from the Anti-Corn Law League, the committee built a grassroots movement that was genuinely popular, even if the city's wealthiest residents stayed largely on the sidelines. The Manchester City News noted that "the rich men of South and East Lancashire, with a few notable exceptions, have not rivalled the enthusiasm of the general public".

  Opposition was fierce. The Mersey Docks Board fought the first bill, which Parliament rejected in January 1883 for breaching Standing Orders. Within six weeks the committee had organised hundreds of petitions; one from Manchester alone carried nearly 200,000 signatures. A second bill was rejected on the 1st of August 1884. The unresolved question of whether a canal would silt up the Mersey estuary kept stalling progress. The breakthrough came accidentally: during questioning before a parliamentary committee, an engineer for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board suggested routing the canal along the shore from Eastham to Runcorn before striking inland. Williams immediately adopted the idea. The third bill, presented in November 1884, passed Parliament on the 2nd of May 1885 and received royal assent on the 6th of August.

• 4. Financing an Impossible Sum

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  The Manchester Ship Canal Act 1885 required the company to issue £8 million in share capital within two years or the act would lapse. Daniel Adamson wanted the money to come from ordinary people, not from a narrow circle of wealthy investors. To make shares accessible, the company issued shilling coupons in books of ten, allowing buyers to pay in instalments since the act forbade shares below £10.

  The response was disappointing. By May 1887 only £3 million had been raised. The construction contractor Thomas Walker agreed to accept £500,000 of his contract price in shares as a stopgap. A second act of Parliament was needed to restructure the capital into £3 million of ordinary shares and £4 million of preference shares. Adamson opposed the debt restructuring and resigned as chairman of the Ship Canal Committee on the 1st of February 1887. The preference shares were underwritten within six days of their issue by Barings and Rothschild on the 15th of July; construction could finally begin. The first sod was cut on the 11th of November 1887 by Lord Egerton of Tatton.

  Financial crisis struck again mid-construction. The company exhausted its entire £8 million capital when only half the work was done. Manchester Corporation rescued the project on the 9th of March 1891 by agreeing to lend £3 million, accepting five seats on a fifteen-member board of directors in return. Costs kept rising; by October 1892 the corporation had committed to a further £1.5 million, and now held an absolute majority on the board, with eleven of twenty-one seats and majorities on five of six sub-committees. Manchester's municipal debt rose by 67 per cent as a result, and local rates climbed by 26 per cent between 1892 and 1895.

• 5. Building the Canal

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  Thomas Walker was appointed contractor and Edward Leader Williams served as chief engineer. The 36-mile route was divided into eight sections, each under its own engineer. For the first two years construction went according to plan, then Walker died on the 25th of November 1889. His executors carried on, but the project was hit by floods and a severe winter in January 1891 that froze the Bridgewater Canal, the company's only source of income at the time. The canal company took direct control of the contracting work and paid £400,000 for all the on-site equipment.

  The railway companies whose bridges crossed the route proved stubborn. The London and North Western Railway and Great Western Railway together demanded about £533,000 in compensation. Their old, low bridges could not be demolished until August 1893, when arbitration settled the dispute and awarded the companies just over £100,000, a fraction of their original claims.

  The sheer scale of the work was staggering. More than 54 million cubic yards of material were excavated, roughly half the amount removed during the building of the Suez Canal. An average of 12,000 workers were on site at any one time, peaking at 17,000. The project used more than 200 miles of temporary rail track, 180 locomotives, over 6,000 trucks and wagons, 124 steam-powered cranes, 192 other steam engines, and 97 steam excavators. Regular navvies were paid per hour for a ten-hour day. Among the engineering landmarks was the Barton Swing Aqueduct, the first swing aqueduct in the world, now a Grade II* listed structure.

  By November 1893 the canal was completely filled with water. The Manchester Ship Canal Police were formed the following month. The canal opened to its first traffic on the 1st of January 1894. The first vessel to unload cargo that day was the Pioneer, belonging to the Co-operative Wholesale Society. On the 21st of May, Queen Victoria performed the official opening, the last of three royal visits she made to Manchester. During the ceremony she knighted the Mayor of Salford, William Henry Bailey, and the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Marshall. Edward Leader Williams received his knighthood on the 2nd of July by letters patent.

• 6. Port, Industry and Railway

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  In its early decades the canal struggled to meet expectations. Gross revenue was less than a quarter of expected net revenue for years, and ship owners were reluctant to dispatch ocean-going vessels along what they privately called a "locked cul-de-sac" at a maximum speed of 6 knots. Ships frequently returned down the canal loaded with ballast rather than freight. Dividends were not paid until 1921.

  Gradually the Port of Manchester found its footing. In late 1898 the Manchester City, weighing 7,698 gross register tons, became the largest vessel to reach the terminal docks, arriving with cattle and general cargo and met by the Lord Mayor and a welcoming crowd. Freight peaked in 1958 at 18 million long tons per year. Manchester Liners established regular ocean services and converted its entire fleet to container vessels in 1968, building two dedicated container terminals beside No. 9 Dock. The four container vessels commissioned that year each weighed 11,898 gross tons, the largest ever to use the terminal docks.

  Alongside the waterway, the construction railway never went away. The more than 200 miles of temporary track and 180 locomotives laid during construction became the foundation of the Manchester Ship Canal Railway, which grew into the largest private railway in the United Kingdom. At its peak it employed 790 people, operated 75 locomotives, 2,700 wagons, and more than 230 miles of track. Unlike most British railways, it was not nationalised in 1948. It completed its conversion from steam to diesel on the 6th of July 1966, more than two years before British Railways managed the same transition.

  Two years after the canal opened, financier Ernest Terah Hooley bought the 1,183-acre estate of Sir Humphrey Francis de Trafford for £360,000 and planned to develop it as an exclusive housing estate. The scheme was abandoned when canal traffic proved slow. Instead, Hooley and Marshall Stevens, the Ship Canal Company's general manager, converted Trafford Park into an industrial estate. Within five years it was home to forty firms and had become Europe's largest industrial estate. The wooden grain silo built opposite No. 9 Dock in 1898, destroyed in the Manchester Blitz in 1940, was at the time Europe's largest grain elevator, with a capacity of 40,000 tons.

• 7. Decline and Reinvention

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  The growth of containerisation during the 1970s and 1980s exposed the canal's structural limits. The maximum vessel size the canal could accept was 530 feet long with a beam of 63.5 feet; the similarly aged Panama Canal could handle ships of up to 950 feet with a beam of 106 feet. Manchester Liners became uncompetitive by the mid-1970s and sold its last ship in 1985. The terminal docks at Salford closed in 1984. By 2000 total freight movements had fallen to 7.56 million long tons, and to 6.60 million long tons by September 2009.

  In 1984 Salford City Council bought the derelict docks using a land grant, rebranding the area as Salford Quays. The Ship Canal Company itself was acquired by Peel Holdings in 1993; as of 2014 it operates under the name Peel Ports, which also owns the Port of Liverpool. In 1986, before the acquisition, Manchester Council agreed to surrender all but one of its board seats in exchange for £10 million, ending an arrangement that had grown complicated by Peel's plan to build a large shopping centre at Dumplington on canal-company land. That centre became the Trafford Centre.

  In 1990, the National Rivers Authority classified the stretch between Trafford Road Bridge and Mode Wheel Locks as "grossly polluted". An oxygenation project began at Salford Quays in 2001 and, combined with reduced industrial discharges, gradually brought fish back to the upper canal. In 2005 salmon were observed breeding in the River Goyt, a tributary of the Mersey, for the first time in living memory. By 2010 the Environment Agency concluded that the canal "does not pose a significant barrier to salmon movement or impact on migratory behaviours". Woolston Eyes, a Site of Special Scientific Interest near Thelwall, now provides habitat for black-necked grebes, grasshopper warblers, great crested newts, and orchids on land that was once canal dredgings. Peel Ports announced a £50 billion Atlantic Gateway plan in 2011 to grow the number of containers transported along the canal from 8,000 in 2010 to 100,000 by 2030.