Qualla: Stratford-upon-Avon Canal

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 2.5. On 20 May 1947 Tom Rolt deliberately picked a fight with the Great Western Railway. The railway had replaced a faulty lift bridge over the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal with a fixed bridge so low no boat could pass beneath it - in effect closing the canal without going through the legal trouble of formally closing it. Rolt, a founder of the new Inland Waterways Association, announced he would navigate his boat through the obstruction on a specified day, with the national press in attendance. The GWR, faced with the publicity, jacked the bridge up onto heavy timbers. The accompanying boat the railway provided promptly got stuck. Rolt's did not. He passed through, the photographs ran in the newspapers, and a derelict canal became, almost overnight, a cause.

Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 2.5

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: Coal Routes Around Birmingham

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Stratford-upon-Avon Canal was conceived in the 1790s as part of a network that would let coal from the Dudley and Stourbridge canals reach Oxford and London without paying tolls to the Birmingham Canal Navigations - whose management was widely considered high-handed. An Act o...

Image: Michael Garlick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: Eighteen Locks and Three Iron Aqueducts

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit planetearthisblue, CC BY-SA 2.0. Work eventually resumed under William James, a shareholder since 1793 with broad interests in turnpike roads, railways, and coal mining; he became chairman and bought the Upper Avon Navigation outright in 1813. A further Act of Parliament in 1815 authorised the canal's final conn...

Image: planetearthisblue | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: Railways Take the Traffic

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The canal was acquired by the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway in 1856, the typical fate of nineteenth-century waterways that found themselves competing with steam. By 1863 the railway company had been absorbed by the Great Western Railway, and traffic on the canal dec...

Image: Public domain

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: The Volunteers Who Refused to Let Go

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Peat, CC BY-SA 2.0. Rolt's 1947 demonstration saved the northern section by making its closure politically embarrassing. The southern section was saved by an entirely different effort. The National Trust took over its management in 1959, and between 1961 and 1964 David Hutchings and the Stratford Ca...

Image: Richard Peat | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stratford-upon-Avon Canal: King's Norton's Guillotine and the Brandwood Tunnel

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom, CC BY-SA 3.0. The canal has its idiosyncrasies. At Kings Norton Junction, where it leaves the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, it passes through what is believed to be the only guillotine-gated stop lock on a British canal - two vertical wooden gates lifted by counterweights to admit boats. A s...

Image: Oosoom | CC BY-SA 3.0