Saltduck

Louth Navigation Trust epetition - please sign The Louth Navigation Trust needs to establish some clarity about ownership of the waterway if it is to bring it back into use... 1. Louth Navigation Trust epetition Louth Navigation Trust to have full access to restore and operate the Louth Canal Responsible department: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs To allow the Louth Navigation Trust, a registered charity to restore the full length of the Louth canal and bring watercourse back into full operational use. This would encompass renovating or renewing existing locks and associated canal structures including banks together with an operational depth put in place for boats/craft to use as a navigable waterway. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/70914 2. The Louth Navigation Trust was formed in 1986 to promote the canal as an amenity, and has established a base in a restored canal warehouse in Louth. A feasibility study for restoring the canal for navigation was commissioned in 2004, and the Trust is hoping that this could be a reality by 2020. Louth Navigation Trust http://www.louthcanal.org.uk/ 3. Louth Navigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louth_Navigation

Thee is an exhibition of Robert Longden's photographs of Life on the Coventry and Oxford canals at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry An Inland Voyage Life on the Coventry and Oxford canals. Inland Voyage reveals the remarkable photographic archive of Coventry factory worker, Robert Longden. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he documented an intimate history of a working life now long gone. The photographs record the narrow boat people he encountered on the waterways, including at Coventry's power station and at Sutton Stop canal junction near Hawkesbury. They catch forever the moment of transformation which saw canals change from being industrial thoroughfares to locations for leisure. Longden's archive has been especially digitally restored and printed for this exhibition. Suitable for all ages, all children must be accompanied by an adult. http://www.theherbert.org/index.php/home/w...n-inland-voyage The exhibition was discussed in The Guardian Photography exhibition reveals life on the canals in the 1940s and 50s Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on Britain's inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s are being shown for the first time guardian.co.uk It seems fitting that the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry should be hosting an exhibition of Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on the inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s. Longden's employer was Sir Alfred Herbert, a local philanthropist who ran the biggest machine-tool company in the world from a factory that backed on to the Coventry canal. Both men died in 1957. Herbert bequeathed the gallery to the city and Longden's photographs are about to be shown there for the first time. "They've gone the full circle," says his great-grandson Stephen Pochin, a London-based artist and photographer who has spent many months cleaning and digitally enhancing the lantern slides that were once Longden's props as he gave talks as president of the Coventry Amateur Photography Society. The 43 large prints capture a way of life that was coming to an end as Longden framed the boat people in the viewfinder of his Leica camera. Two years before Longden's death, aged 78, councillors in Coventry were clamouring to fill in the waterways and cover them with Tarmac. Thankfully, a local canal preservation society was formed to fight the plans, and they won a reprieve. Today the Canal basin warehouses are full of artists' studios, and there are more than 30 pieces of public art along the five-mile stretch to Sutton Stop, where the Coventry and Oxford canals converge. Full text at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jun...s-1940s-longden

A book review has appeared on the H-Net, the academic book reviews site http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24150 which might interest some members of the waterways communities... The book certainly pushes back - and makes more complicated - the history of waterways in England. Saltduck John Blair, ed. Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England. Medieval History and Archaeology Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 315 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-921715-1. Reviewed by James A. Galloway (Institute of Historical Research, University of London) Published on H-Albion (November, 2009) Commissioned by Margaret McGlynn A Golden Age of Water Transport "The starting point for this project," writes John Blair in his preface to this volume, "was my growing conviction during the 1990s, as I worked on the medieval landscapes of the upper Thames region, that I was encountering watercourses that were neither natural nor recent, and could only be understood as relict canals" (p. v). This growing belief led Blair to convene a colloquium, held in Oxford in 1999, of scholars from a variety of disciplines whose own work seemed to be pointing in a similar direction, or whose expertise bore directly on the broader theme of watercourses and water transport in the Middle Ages. The papers presented at that meeting form the core of the present volume, developed over a number of years through the exchange of drafts and the addition of a number of invited contributors. The result is a valuable and thought-provoking collection of essays, written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches. Archaeology, place-name studies, and physical geography are all represented, as well as mainstream (if the pun be allowed) documentary history. Chronologically, the emphasis is on the period between the mid-tenth and mid-thirteenth centuries, although some essays review the Roman and early Saxon background, while others, notably those of Mark Gardiner and John Langdon, draw extensively on later medieval sources. Geographically, the core of the book focuses on the Thames, Severn, and Wash/Humber systems, which, Blair convincingly argues, were the core economic and cultural conduits of England in the earlier and central Middle Ages. Two maps in Blair's introductory chapter, on pages 16 and 18, graphically represent this centrality, based on the evidence of place-names, coin finds, and the later purveyance accounts. Water transport in England, the evidence marshaled in this volume persuasively indicates, was a dynamic and vital system in the centuries immediately before and after the Norman Conquest. Not yet irreparably cluttered in their upper reaches by fish weirs, mill-dams, and bridges, the major rivers carried trade goods, domestic and imported, far inland and in return exported the produce of the countryside. Small landing places, indicated by the place-name element hythe, lined the banks of the rivers from their mouths to locations far inland. Gardiner's chapter reviews the types and functions of these small ports and landing places and stresses their continuing role in the later Middle Ages. Significantly, as Ann Cole points out in her valuable analysis of water transport related place-names, the Thames had more -hythe place-names than any other river. For full text SEE http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24150