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Illtyd (far left) travelling along a decaying section of the Birmingham Canal Navigation, with his advisors |
Hunt for profits is sucking canals dry
Our wonderful canal system has been systematically run down as the land alongside its towpaths is snapped up by developers, writes Illtyd Harrington
I AM having what Brecht, the German playwright, called “a long anger”, caused by watching nearly 40 years of life whittled away.
Few people in this country did more than myself to advance the cause for retaining and developing our canals and waterways systems.
No, I am not a vain, superannuated septuagenarian, but someone who cares about the environment and did something about it. Don’t bore me with talk about a stealth tax. I’ll give you my undivided attention if you wish to discuss the creeping advance of the big, and I mean big, property developers who are steadily encroaching onto public land – land which has become more attractive and valuable near water because of mine and other people’s efforts.
Of course they beat their breasts and plead that their sole aim is to earn a few honest shillings from these prime sites and to gladly share the bonanza with the locals in affordable housing plus planning gain. Perhaps not opening an Olympic sized swimming pool, more likely a grotty bingo hall.
They’ve changed the tune but they sang the same song through the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s. Look them with challenge in your eye and like caught-out kids you’ll get, “Not me, guv. I too, like yourself, believe in public amenities.” If you believe that, you must think Adolf was a saint.
That’s where I come in. Way back in the 1960s, four of us met in a house in St Mark’s Crescent. One later rose to become the Head of the Countryside Commission, another town planner with a radical imagination eventually married Lord David Sainsbury.
Before a very senior civil servant in the Department of the Environment got to work within government, our own counter-intelligence, elegant Whitehall mandarins contemptuously referred to us as “The Bargees”.
Our efforts culminated in a large section of Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act, being devoted to maintaining the derelict and ignored system of 2,000 miles of waterways. She was determined to give it a feature. She got me to join the British Waterways Board and chair the Nationwide Advisory council on their future.
My job, defined by her, was to awaken and capture gathering interest. No Jesuit missionary had a more satisfying task as I sallied forth into the lofty and craggy islands that surrounded the majestic Caledonian canal to the grime and filth around Manchester.
I marched on with my army of advisors. We staked out our support to restore the incredible rural splendour of the Kennet-Avon canal, now achieved from Bristol to Reading. And the noble Mon and Brec, 618 feet high in the Brecon Beacons amongst many more.
But it was London where we won a major battle to open the enclosed 20-mile towpath, now lined by narrow boats festooning it like Christmas decorations. There is unlimited towpath walking from Paddington to the West.
After my appointments by Castle to the appropriate boards, I was sacked as a nuisance by the incoming government of Edward Heath, but later reappointed by Harold Wilson. At the Greater London Council (GLC), we had a committee where the nine boroughs which run alongside the Grand Union Regent’s Canal met.
There was enormous local interest throughout London. Of course it was satisfying to see President Bill Clinton having a pint in the pub in the restored Gas Street Basin during a break in the G7 summit.
Birmingham has more canals than Venice. Some of my successors argued, reasonably, for a more balanced form of development.
No-one fancies being permanently dressed up in the traditional 19th-century clothes of canal people, shod in clogs, caps or frilly bonnets, but those long and greedy fingers grab restlessly for profits first.
What was all that quaint language about a great historic tradition and the concept of blending old and new? Well, this grumpy old man is bitter that ideas of marrying urban and rural tranquillity are being spuriously brushed aside, be it in the Islington Basin, or elsewhere, justified by the claim of affordable housing – a term which defies definition. Who, I ask, gains most in planning gain? Meanwhile, the office of the Deputy Prime Minister has cut the annual grant to the British Waterways board.
The same John Prescott, who as far back as 1971 advised me after my dismissal by the Tories that Barbara Castle’s legacy, would be safe with a future Labour government – a government, alas, which embraces the omnipotence of market forces.
They will have little bother in reconciling themselves with the seductive voice of the developers, anxious to fill the vacuum in a buyer’s market. This is the day of the locust. We need no lessons in asset-stripping.
Some of the most desirable sites in London and the UK lie alongside our waterways. But are they ours anymore? A vicious bloodbath has taken place on sites near the Olympic Village, near the river Lea. Some of the participants would qualify for membership of the Mafia.
A few honourable district surveyors of my intimacy speak of a “Wild West approach”. No-one in government seems to care. They are stealing our land for themselves.
A hundred years ago the Liberals used to sing a hymn: “God gave the land to the people.” I hope he’s watching them and us, so we can get it back.
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