Shrewsbury Canal

From 1768 several small canals were built in the area of what is now Telford. These canals carried tub boats. The first of these was the Donnington Wood Canal which opened in 1768, to be followed by the Wombridge Canal and the Ketley Canal, both opened in 1788, and the Shropshire Canal, which opened in 1791. The network linked Lilleshall and Pave Lane in the north to Coalbrookdale and Coalport in the south. Following a survey of the route by George Young from Worcester in 1792, an act of Parliament, the '''''' (33 Geo. 3. c. 113) was obtained in 1793 which authorised the creation of a canal to link the town of Shrewsbury with the east Shropshire canal network serving coal mines and ironworks around Oakengates, Ketley, Donnington Wood and Trench, nowadays part of the new town of Telford. The act authorised the raising of £50,000 in shares, and an additional £20,000 if necessary. This canal became the Shrewsbury Canal, and incorporated of the Wombridge Canal, which were purchased for £840 from William Reynolds to provide access to the Donnington Wood Canal and the Shropshire Canal. Josiah Clowes was appointed chief engineer, but died in 1795 part way through construction. He was succeeded by Thomas Telford, then just establishing himself as Shropshire's county surveyor and already engaged on the Ellesmere Canal slightly further north. The Ellesmere Canal was originally intended to connect Chester with Shrewsbury, but never reached the latter – it became the modern Llangollen Canal and Montgomery Canal. Infrastructure One of Telford's first tasks was to build Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct as a rebuild of a stone aqueduct over the River Tern at Longdon-on-Tern which had been built by Clowes but swept away by floods in February 1795. This action saved the cost of replacing the swing bridge at the basin entrance. Traffic on the Humber Arm ended in 1922, when the fifth Duke of Sutherland closed the wharf and the railway line to Lilleshall. No traffic used the canal to Shrewsbury after 1936, and a further section beyond Comet bridge was abandoned in 1939. Small volumes of coal were still reaching Longdon in 1939, and just 100 tons per year were recorded on the Newport Branch in 1943. The LMS finally abandoned the canal network in 1944, when they obtained the London Midland and Scottish Railway (Canals) Act 1944 (8 & 9 Geo. 6. c. ii) allowing that. The Shrewsbury Canal was just a small part of the abandoned under the 1944 act. Following the transfer of responsibility for the canal network to British Waterways in 1963, much of the route of the canal was sold to local landowners. ==Restoration==

In 2000, the Shrewsbury Canal was the only one of the canals that formed part of the Shropshire Union Canal system which had no part open or under restoration. The Shrewsbury & Newport Canals Trust was created in that year to preserve and restore the waterway. In 2007, the canalside buildings at Wappenshall, including a transshipment warehouse which has been little altered since it ceased to be used in the 1930s, and retains many original features, were put up for sale. They were eventually purchased, along with a length of the canal and the Wappenshall basin, by Telford and Wrekin Council, who are working with the Trust to allow repairs to the buildings to be undertaken, with the aim of providing a museum and heritage centre for the canal, a café, and offices for the Canals Trust. In August 2015, work began on a short section of the canal to the east of Newport, between Forton Aqueduct and Skew Bridge. The channel at this location is still owned by the Canal and River Trust who supported the work by the Trust and the Waterway Recovery Group, which involves reprofiling the bed and laying a Bentonite lining, with a view to rewatering the section in the summer of 2016. The waterproof lining was supplied by the Inland Waterways Association. ==Route==

The canal branched away from the Shropshire Union Canal at Norbury Junction, passing under a stone bridge which carried the Shropshire Union towpath over the branch. The bridge is a Grade II listed structure. The section to the first lock is still in water as it is used for moorings, while the first lock is used as a dry dock. The lock was the first in a flight of 17, which lowered the canal down the hillside as it passed through Oulton and to the south of Sutton and Forton. At the bottom of the flight, the canal and a minor road crossed the River Meese on the Forton Aqueduct, before passing under Skew Bridge which carries the road over the canal. The aqueduct is a scheduled ancient monument. The River Meese feeds the Aqualate Mere, which is a National Nature Reserve and the largest lake in the West Midlands region, covering . Soon afterwards, the route of the canal has been cut by the building of the A41 Newport bypass. Beyond the bypass, Meretown lock marks the start of a watered section, which passes through Newport and included another five locks. The Strine Brook passes under the canal at both ends of this section, running parallel to the canal between the two aqueducts. The canal passed under Buttery Bridge, and then over Kinnersley Drive on an aqueduct, before the junction with the Humber Branch, which ran for about to the south, and served the industrial complex of Lilleshall. Two more aqueducts carried it over the Humber Brook and the Crow Brook, before the junction at Wappenshall where the new branch joined the original canal from Trench to Shrewsbury. At the junction, the warehouses, basin and a section of the canal have been bought by Telford and Wrekin Council, and include a Grade II Listed warehouse which straddled a dock, so that goods could be loaded and unloaded through trapdoors in the floor of the upper storey. The Trench branch rose through nine locks from the junction, which were called Wappenshall, Britton, Wheat Leasowes, Shucks, Peaty, Hadley Park, Turnip, Baker's and Trench lock. Wappenshall Lock was demolished to make way for a weir which is part of a storm drain. Hadley Park and Turnip locks are Grade II listed structures, as is the bridge immediately downstream of Hadley Park lock, and both locks still have their original guillotine mechanism in situ. Beyond Trench lock, which was demolished in 1977 as part of a roadworks scheme, the Trench Pool was the main water supply for the canal, after which the Trench incline carried boats another upwards. The building of an incline, rather than a flight of locks was dictated by the lack of an adequate water supply at the higher level. The locks on the Trench Branch, and the two Eyton locks, had guillotine gates at the lower end. They were long, and although Thomas Telford wrote in 1797 that they had a third set of gates, so that they could be used by a single tub-boat in the short section, a train of three tub-boats in the longer section, or a train of four boats if the outer gates were used, there is no evidence that the middle gates were ever fitted. After Wappenshall junction the canal dropped down through the two Eyton locks, which were widened when the Newport Branch was built, passing to the north of Eyton upon the Weald Moors and through Sleapford, before crossing the River Tern on the aqueduct at Longdon-on-Tern. The canal then headed south-west, skirting the southern edge of Rodington, where it crossed the River Roden on an aqueduct which was demolished in January 1971, and the eastern and southern edge of Withington, where there was a wharf. It passed under the Shrewsbury to Telford railway line south of Upton Magna, where the new line of the A5 road has blocked the line of the canal, to reach Berwick Wharf. Here it turned north-west, to enter the Berwick Tunnel. At the time of its construction, this was the longest canal tunnel in Britain, and the first equipped with a towpath through it. From the northern portal of the tunnel, it passed under the railway and the A5 road again, heading north to Uffington, after which it followed the large horseshoe bend in the River Severn to reach Shrewsbury where it terminated at Castle Foregate Basin adjacent to the Buttermarket building. ==See also==