Skip to content
RichseenAtlas← AtlasSign in

The Bridgewater Canal

node · earth · Worsley to Manchester, Lancashire, England

The canal from the Duke of Bridgewater's coal mines at Worsley into Manchester, engineered by James Brindley and opened in 1761 — usually taken as the start of the British canal age, and unusual in being built by a single landowner to move a single commodity from his own pits to his own market. Two things made it a demonstration rather than merely a canal. It was cut without following a river valley, crossing the Irwell on the Barton aqueduct, which most contemporaries expected to fall down; and underground it ran directly into the mine, so coal was loaded in the workings and not handled again until Manchester. The delivered price of coal in the city is generally said to have roughly halved. That number is what persuaded everyone else, and the two decades after 1761 saw a rush of canal Acts on the strength of it.

Read in · 1

Evidence · 1
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 26 blocks · 1 evidence · 27 related

  1. Story
  2. The canal from the Duke of Bridgewater's coal mines at Worsley into Manchester, engineered by James Brindley and opened in 1761 — usually taken as the start of the British canal age, and unusual in being built by a single landowner to move a single commodity from his own pits to his own market. Two things made it a demonstration rather than merely a canal. It was cut without following a river valley, crossing the Irwell on the Barton aqueduct, which most contemporaries expected to fall down; and underground it ran directly into the mine, so coal was loaded in the workings and not handled again until Manchester. The delivered price of coal in the city is generally said to have roughly halved. That number is what persuaded everyone else, and the two decades after 1761 saw a rush of canal Acts on the strength of it.
  3. Knowledge
  4. The British canal network
  5. The Bridgewater Canal
  6. Manchester
  7. Connections
  8. The British canal network
  9. Manchester
  10. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
  11. Coal
  12. The Bridgewater Canal
  13. The British railway network
  14. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
  15. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
  16. The Bridgewater Canal
  17. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
  18. The steam engine
  19. Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
  20. Birmingham
  21. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
  22. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
  23. Chadwick reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population
  24. The census records an urban majority
  25. Evidence
  26. Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.
Close the narrative
Observed changes · 0

No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.

Actions

Read the assembled narrativeContinue in StudioOpen TwinTwin does not start a decision from this kind of object.ShareSaveSaved objects are part of the authenticated projection, which is declared and not yet built.

/atlas?object=SITE_BRIDGEWATER_CANAL&experience=SITE_BRIDGEWATER_CANAL