River Avon, Warwickshire

• 1. Introduction

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  The River Avon in central England answers to more than one name. It is called the Warwickshire Avon, and Shakespeare's Avon, and those names hint at something the geography confirms: this river has carried the weight of history in ways that most English rivers simply have not. It rises from a spring near the village of Naseby in Northamptonshire and travels 85 miles before it joins the River Severn at Tewkesbury, passing through Rugby, Warwick, and Stratford-upon-Avon along the way.

  The name itself contains a small joke on the English language. "Avon" comes from the old British word abona, meaning "river." It also survives as the modern Welsh afon and Cornish avon, both meaning the same thing. So "River Avon" translates, quite literally, as "River River." Linguists call this a tautological place name, and England has more than a few of them.

  What makes the Avon unusual is not its name, or even its Shakespearean associations, but the story of what happened when it stopped being useful. The river was developed as a navigation route in the 1600s, fell into ruin over the following two centuries, and was then rebuilt, almost entirely by volunteers, in a restoration effort that stretched across the second half of the twentieth century. That effort raises a question worth following: who saves a river, and why?

• 2. A River Redrawn by Ice

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  About 50,000 years ago, before the last glacial period, the Warwickshire Avon was a much smaller river, and it drained in the opposite direction. It ran northwards to join the River Trent, not southwestwards to the Severn. That original course was erased by ice.

  During the Wolstonian glacial period, glaciers advanced into the English Midlands from the north, east, and west simultaneously. The ice blocked the Avon's route to the Trent, trapping the water. To the south lay the Cotswold Hills. The result was a glacial lake of enormous scale, known today as Lake Harrison, which is thought to have covered the entirety of Warwickshire and reached depths of over 200 feet.

  For roughly 10,000 years, that lake sat in the Midlands basin. When the glacier finally retreated, the accumulated water had nowhere to go but southwest. It cut through the watershed that had previously separated it from the Severn drainage, and in doing so carved out the route the Avon follows today. The river's 1,032 square miles of catchment, its towns, its navigation history, and the flooding patterns that still shape the landscape were all set in place by the direction a sheet of ice happened to take tens of thousands of years ago.

• 3. Opening the Navigation

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  In 1635, King Charles I issued letters patent naming William Sandys as the grantee empowered to improve the Avon for navigation. Sandys had already bought several mills along the river, which gave him a working relationship with the people most likely to object to locks and weirs interfering with water flow. He handled the potential opposition carefully. For the mills he did not own, he built pound locks with two sets of gates, which let vessels pass through without the large loss of water associated with older flash locks. The only formal objection came from Sir William Russell, owner of Strensham mill, and his complaint was about land purchase, not the navigation works themselves.

  By 1641, the river was reported to be navigable to within four miles of Warwick. Further improvements above Evesham followed from 1664, led by Andrew Yarranton, working for Lord Windsor. Yarranton constructed three navigation weirs, a type of flash lock with a single barrier, designed to let boats cross over shoals. Once his work was finished, barges of 30 tonnes could reach Stratford.

  Ownership of the navigation was formally divided in 1717 into the Upper Avon, from Evesham up toward Stratford, and the Lower Avon, from Evesham down to the Severn. In 1758, George Perrott leased the Lower Avon and spent over four thousand pounds upgrading the locks to accommodate 40-ton barges. The work was completed by 1768, and for a time the river carried genuine commercial weight.

• 4. Decline and Abandonment

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  William James bought all the shares in the Upper Avon company in 1813 with the conviction that the river could become a through route linking waterways across the region. He persuaded the Stratford Canal shareholders to create a junction between their canal and the river at Stratford, which opened on the 24th of June 1816. In 1822, he spent six thousand pounds repairing the upper river's locks, then went bankrupt.

  Seven men, all with connections to the Stratford Canal, took over and made improvements, including converting a lock at Stratford into a two-rise staircase lock. Most of the traffic that followed was local, hauling coal between Stratford and Evesham. The Upper Avon was leased to the Stratford Canal from 1842, but traffic was thin, and the lease was not renewed in 1847. When the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway arrived at Stratford, the navigation's commercial purpose collapsed. The company tried to sell it to local landowners for one hundred and fifty pounds and found no buyers. They abandoned it in 1857. A railway manager named John Broughton bought it for three hundred pounds at the urging of local traders, but his venture did not last. The railway he worked for eventually became part of the Great Western Railway, which decided in 1875 it would no longer maintain the river. An appeal to the Railway Commissioners in 1877 confirmed they had no obligation to do so.

  The Lower Avon held on longer but suffered too. A railway link from Ashchurch to Evesham opened in 1864 and cut deeply into river traffic. By 1872, receipts had fallen to one hundred and thirty-nine pounds. By the end of the Second World War, a single barge was still working the stretch between Tewkesbury and Pershore. Above Pershore, the river had become unnavigable.

• 5. Restoration by Volunteers

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  The restoration of the Avon began with a newspaper article. In March 1949, the Evesham Journal published a piece on the river's history and its decline. Robert Aickman read it and began a correspondence with the editor, arguing that the navigation could be brought back. C. Douglas Barwell sought legal advice on how to structure the effort, and in 1950 the Lower Avon Navigation Trust, known as LANT, was constituted as a charity. The BBC broadcast news of the proposals in April of that year.

  By May 1952, LANT had raised over four thousand pounds despite the austerity of the postwar period. The Royal Engineers assisted with the reconstruction of Chadbury Lock as a training exercise, raising public awareness and making further fundraising appeals possible. By 1962, LANT had raised over fifty thousand pounds. The seven locks between Tewkesbury and Evesham were restored to working order, and the Lower Avon was reopened. Mrs Barwell, the wife of Douglas Barwell, formally opened the waterway in June 1962. Mr. Barwell received an OBE for his work on the navigation.

  The Upper Avon was a harder problem. Most of its original locks and weirs no longer existed. The Upper Avon Navigation Trust, known as UANT, was constituted in 1965, and the project was led by David Hutchings, who had just finished leading the restoration of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal. He obtained permission to build a new lock at Stratford in early 1966 and launched an appeal for six thousand pounds to fund it. Work began on the 19th of July 1966, once half the target had been raised. The concept of building entirely new locks using volunteer labour was without precedent at that scale.

  An Inland Waterways Association national restoration fund launched in 1969 provided further support. Phase one, covering the section from Evesham to Bidford Bridge, was declared open on the 12th of June 1971 during a boat rally at Bidford. The total estimated cost for the complete restoration was two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. All but twenty-five thousand pounds of that came from public subscriptions; the Department of the Environment provided the grant of twenty-five thousand pounds at the time of the phase one opening. Nine new locks were built in all, reopening seventeen miles of river that had been derelict for over a century. On the 1st of June 1974, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother returned to Stratford to declare the restored upper river open. Hutchings received an MBE for his leadership of what was, at that date, the largest waterway restoration project of its type.

• 6. Life on the Water Today

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  From Alveston weir, two miles upstream of Stratford-upon-Avon, down to Tewkesbury, the Avon is now navigable by boats up to 70 feet long, 13 feet 6 inches in beam, 10 feet in height, and 4 feet in draught. Above Evesham, the beam limit tightens to 12 feet 6 inches and the draught to 3 feet. All traffic is leisure-oriented; the commercial era is over.

  The Stratford-upon-Avon Canal connects to the Avon through a lock in the park in front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. That junction is a starting point for the Avon Ring, a circular cruising route of 109 miles that includes 129 locks and loops through the Severn, the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, and the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal before returning to the Avon at Stratford. Two manually operated pedestrian chain ferries still cross the river: the Hampton Ferry at Evesham, and the Stratford-upon-Avon Ferry in Stratford.

  Commercial activity returned briefly in May 2010, when barges transported some 15,000 tonnes of clay from Birlingham downstream to flood defence works at Pershore, following flooding in 2007. The use of barges was calculated to save around 3,000 lorry journeys. At Birlingham, the excavation site was managed to create a wetland reserve for wildlife, with 32 acres of wet grassland and 5 acres of open water and reed beds, now called the John Bennett Reserve.

  On the 16th of July 2021, Craig Openshaw, a 41-year-old from Tewkesbury and a former competitive pool swimmer, set off from Alveston Weir at 8 in the evening with four crew members supporting him by land and boat. He swam the entire 47.1-mile navigable length of the Avon, finishing at 01:18 on the 18th of July, 29 hours and 18 minutes after he started. The Avon Navigation Trust confirmed the swim had never been completed before. Openshaw and his crew raised seventeen thousand eight hundred pounds for Cancer Research UK.