The Telford Cut

37.1. Map 9

Conditions on the Brindley Canal in the first quarter of the C19th. were quite scandalous. Smeaton's work had reduced delays at Merry Hill for a time, but traffic had continued to increase while the cut decayed. Shallowness due to water shortage and bank slumping caused frequent grounding despite light loading. Yet despite the paramount importance of the canal to town and region, the wealthy company did little to improve it until 1824, when they called in Thomas Telford.

The famous road and canal engineer's report cannot be bettered for terse accu-racy. '…Were it enters Birmingham, it has become little more than a crooked ditch with scarcely the appearance of a haling-path, the horses frequently sliding and staggering in the water, the haling-lines sweeping the ground into the canal, and the entanglement at the meeting of boats being incessant. Whilst at the locks at each end of the short summit at Smethwick, crowds of boatmen are always quarrelling or offering premiums for a preference of passage, and the mine-owners, injured by the delay, are loud in their just complaints'.

Telford's improvements - suggested by Watt decades before - were drastic and dramatic. He removed the Smethwick summit altogether by means of a new cut beside the old, 70 feet deep at greatest, and across Birmingham drove a channel from the boundary to Fazeley Junction which ignored terrain, keeping the 53-foot level by means of great banks and cuts. This 40-foot wide canal cut across the four great loops in the parish, leaving them as feeders. It had shored-up banks and well-made towpaths on each side. The fine skew-bricked Lee Bridge (1826) was built to carry Dudley Road across the deep trench. With other cuts across Black Country loops, Telford reduced a slow and roundabout 22-miles route to 14 lock-free and unhindered miles.

At the summit he built the attractive Galton Bridge in cast-iron to carry Roebuck Lane over his mighty gorge, and took a branch canal feeder from Smethwick Great Reservoir over his cut to Smeaton's summit on an iron aqueduct. The cuttings obtained water from every stream they underlay, but really large reserves were needed, net only to replace losses through evaporation and seepage, but to make good the constant drain at both ends of the 14-mile summit, into the Tettenhall Gap and the Tame Valley, as well as the descents into the Wa1sal1 group of canals.