Building Britain's Canals
From March 11th 2025.
A new exhibition will uncover the story of how the canals were built.
This exhibition celebrates the work of the surveyors and engineers who designed the routes and structures of the canals, leading to the creation of the profession of civil engineering, and the thousands of unnamed labourers, the navvies, who worked in difficult and dangerous conditions with their picks, spades and wheelbarrows.
At its peak, the canal system in the UK was nearly 4,000 miles in length. Most of the system was built in the ‘Golden Age’ of canals, between 1770 and the 1830s, during which period a "canal mania" arose in the early 1790s when huge sums were invested in canal building.
The industrial revolution in the 18th century hastened the need for transport of goods from and to the manufacturing areas of the Midlands and North of England. Most roads at the time were rutted and potholed and often impassable. River transport was possible, but conditions were unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, and rivers rarely went to the places where the goods were needed. Canals allowed the goods produced to be transported to their markets and to coastal ports for export and bring in the raw materials to make them in the first place, connected major cities to our industrial heartland and were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution.
