The Birmingham Canal Navigations Through Time

This fascinating selection of more than 180 photographs traces some of the many ways in which the Birmingham Canal Navigations have changed and developed over the last century.

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The Birmingham canals truly got underway following an advertisement in Birmingham's Aris's Gazette of 26 January 1767. The plan was to take a waterway from Wolverhampton to Birmingham with a branch to Lord Dudley's coal mines near Wednesbury, and this canal network continued to grow extensively until the 1860s. With the decline in the demand for coal after the Second World War, the BCN lost sixty of its miles, but it has nevertheless largely survived to the present day. R. H. Davies, author of Canal Crimes, takes the reader on a journey from Birmingham along the main line canal through Tipton and Oldbury, exploring the Dudley and Stourbridge canals, and continuing on to Walsall and Wolverhampton. He concludes with images of canals that have vanished over time and of the Black Country Living Museum, which preserves aspects of life in the Black Country that would otherwise be lost.