Qualla: Gas Street Basin

Gas Street Basin: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Oosoom at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. For more than twenty years, two canals met in the centre of Birmingham and refused to touch. When the Worcester and Birmingham Canal arrived at this spot in 1795, the older Birmingham Canal Navigations company forbade them from connecting. The two waterways ran parallel for eighty-four yards with a stone wall seven feet wide between them, called the Worcester Bar. Boats coming from Worcester had to unload at one side and porters carried the cargo by hand to boats waiting on the other. Coal, iron, salt, and pottery moved in and out of Birmingham this way, lifted from one canal and dropped into the next, all because the BCN owners would not share their water. The barrier survived until 1815, when Parliament finally cut a lock through it.

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Image: Original uploader was Oosoom at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gas Street Basin: Why the wall went up

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. Canals depended on water, and water was a scarce, jealously guarded asset. The Birmingham Canal had been completed in 1773 to bring coal from the Black Country mines into the city, and its owners had spent years getting the reservoirs and feeders right. When the Worcester and Bir...

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Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gas Street Basin: The bar comes down

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pressure built throughout the early 1800s. The Worcester and Birmingham finally opened all the way to Worcester in 1815, and the lobbying by canal users became impossible to ignore. An Act of Parliament that same year forced the BCN to allow a lock through the bar, called the bar...

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Image: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gas Street Basin: From working basin to tourist heart

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Beards, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the late 20th century Gas Street Basin had become a backwater in the literal sense. The factories that had filled the warehouses around the basin were closing, and most cargo traffic had long since vanished. Then in the 1990s Birmingham reinvented itself around its waterways. ...

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Image: Graham Beards | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gas Street Basin: Pop culture and quiet evenings

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0. Gas Street Basin had its small brush with show business in 1973, when it appeared in the Cliff Richard musical film Take Me High, in which Cliff plays a merchant banker sent to Birmingham who falls in love with a chef and helps her open a hamburger boat on the canal. The film is ...

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Image: Graham Taylor | CC BY-SA 2.0