A Different World

As part of the background text for my 1987 book on the Manchester Ship Canal “The Big Ditch” I wrote the following:

“The Manchester Ship Canal was a vision that turned Manchester, an inland city crippled by escalating dock charges from neighbouring Liverpool, into one of the worlds busiest ports. It took seven years of digging, by more than 16,000 navvies, to create the country’s greatest inland waterway. Over 36 miles long, 200- plus feet across and 30 feet deep, the canal is a monument to Victorian tenacity and forethought.

The success of the canal was such that ships would queue, sometimes for days, to pass along the canal to the docks at Salford, where loading and unloading of goods from all over the world became a continuous process. This state of prosperity lasted for over seventy years until inevitably, improved road links to the coastal ports and larger lorries meant that trade began to move away from the canal onto the motorways; by the late sixties the decline in cargo handling was irreversible.

Nowadays it is a shadow of its former self; the docks are almost totally demolished and very little traffic ventures further upstream than Runcorn, leaving twenty miles of waterway virtually deserted. Attempts are at last being made to breathe life into the canal, but it is doubtful if a return to its glory days will ever be seen; maybe the canal’s future lies in other directions?

If this world-renowned canal is allowed to die a part of the North’s industrial heritage will die with it!”

Well the canal didn’t die and my fascination for it has never left me;(to the point that when I drive over the motorway bridges spanning the canal I am a danger to myself, and others, as I crane to get a look at what’s happening down below).

When I was producing The Big Ditch images it would have been impossible to imagine that twenty years in the future I would be walking the same ground, but this time watching swans, and kids, swimming in the basins; people fishing and sunbathing alongside the water, and perhaps the most unimaginable, householders mowing their lawns, where twenty years previous had been mountains of rubble and twisted steel.

Walking around the docks (old habits die hard, I guess I should now refer to them as Quays!) to produce the new images as requested by the Lowry it was hard not to be impressed by the changes that have taken place.

During this period my thoughts went beyond the localised changes to dwell on how the world had changed in the intervening period. I walked past well kept gardens looking like something straight out of ‘House and Home’ and thought about how people’s aspirations had changed, and also how much smaller the world has become since those earlier days..

With such thoughts in mind I went on to produce the new work. A sequence of images that reflect in more ways than the purely physical, the sense that we are indeed living in “A Different World”.