Lichfield Canal, near Fosseway Lane, Staffordshire
Between towering brick walls, an overgrown passage marks the course of the former Lichfield Canal. Once filled with water and traversed by working narrowboats, the channel is now occupied by grasses and vegetation. Its substantial masonry offers a clue to the scale of the engineering involved, yet little in its present appearance conveys the importance this waterway once held.
Opened in 1797 as part of the Wyrley and Essington Canal, the seven-mile route linked the industrial Black Country with the Coventry Canal at Huddlesford. Its thirty locks enabled boats to negotiate the changing landscape, carrying coal from the Cannock Chase coalfields towards more distant industrial markets. For more than a century, waterways such as this were fundamental to the movement of raw materials that sustained Britain's industrial economy. As railways and subsequently road transport offered faster, more flexible alternatives, commercial traffic declined. Navigation rights were extinguished in 1954, and much of the canal was drained and filled in during the following decade.
What makes this surviving fragment remarkable is the contrast between its former importance and the ease with which it became redundant. An expensive and technically ambitious piece of infrastructure, once essential to regional prosperity, could eventually be regarded as an obstacle to development rather than an asset. Yet attitudes continue to change. Volunteers are now painstakingly restoring sections of the canal, giving a structure built for industrial commerce a possible future in recreation and conservation. What one generation abandons, another may discover is worth preserving.