Has anyone any information, please, about Henry Bradford, credited with surveying a line from Coventry to Tamworth in 1766, supposedly a fore-runner to the Coventry Canal? Is he, for instance, the Quaker timber merchant (b.1698) from whom, apparently, Birmingham's 'Bradford Street' is named?
I ask, because the Coventry promoters seem to have taken things ahead with their canal very fast. Although Jim Shead's website claims that Brindley surveyed for them in January 1767, Josiah Wedgwood - rather closer to the action - notes in March 1767 that when the Coventry men asked James Brindley for a survey, he had told them they were 'too precipitate' but that he would 'look over the country in a year or two if he could.' In the event, by November 1767 the Coventry contingent were petitioning Parliament for a Bill on the basis that they had ' a survey lately taken.' So might it have been Henry Bradford's line that they meant? Of course, this question may be one to which there's just no clear answer.