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.