The British canal network

node · earth · England, Wales and central Scotland

The transport system that made bulk coal cheap inland, and the one that is routinely under-credited because the railways arrived so soon after it. The physics is the whole argument: a horse that can pull a ton or two in a cart on a made road can pull thirty or more in a boat on still water, so cutting a canal changed the delivered price of coal, lime, stone, clay and grain by a multiple rather than a margin. Britain built the network between the 1760s and about 1830, in a private, piecemeal, Act-by-Act way that produced no common standard — narrow and broad locks, different gauges of boat, competing companies refusing through traffic — which is exactly the inheritance that would later make the network hard to defend against a competitor with a single technology. Canals also created the first industrial engineering profession, the first large civil-engineering labour force, and the first experience for British investors of putting capital into a fixed asset that returns nothing for years and then a great deal.