Around Britain by Canal by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRANSPORTATION / Ships & Shipbuilding / General
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2018-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Tom Pudding Land

Leeds marked a real turning point in our journey. We came in on the canal but went out on the river navigation. For the first time, we were about to travel waterways where trade was not just a distant, romantic memory. You feel the difference at once, as you move out on to the wide, deep waters. The speed of the boat picks up. It is like changing the old family banger for a new sports car. All around us were the signs of a thriving commercial life, and reminders of just how important river traffic was in the creation of the early commercial centres. Out on the river, warehouses and wharves are still in use, and even the steam cranes, used for unloading coal at the Co-op wharf, were working until a year or so ago. Locks are modern, with traffic lights to control the movement of boats, and instead of the usual sensation of trying to get a big boat into a small lock, you suddenly feel you are in a very small boat all but lost in the lock chamber. After two weeks of sweating over heavy gates and obstinate paddle gear it is undeniably pleasant to put your feet up, as it were, while the man in the control cabin presses a few buttons to work the whole lot.

Our view of industry so far had mostly been of the old and decaying, which is what you might expect to find along a transport route that is itself old, if not actually decaying. There is no longer a rush to site a factory by the cut. This is understandable, but it does mean that the canal traveller begins to wonder if everything is not running down, collapsing around us. Now that we were out on the broad commercial waterway we began to see evidence of the new industrial life. The old clothing industry from which Leeds once gained its prosperity is pushed further and further into the background, while the engineering works and chemical plants spread out over acres of ground. But these new industries have brought new problems with them – heavy transport, the need for more and more land, waste, pollution. The Aire and Calder pierces the industrial waste land, flat, marked only by the man-made heaps of spoil. It is a scene of devastation, a nightmare landscape. Nothing grows here. Not even the scavenger birds hover. There is only dust whipped up by the wind. The brief glimpses of apparently natural ponds and pools are deceptive for they, too, are part of the wilderness, mining flashes or chemical dumps. This is the landscape we create as we create our wealth.

At Leeds, the Leeds & Liverpool joins the Aire & Calder Navigation, which was still carrying commercial traffic.

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