Derby Canal: Sandiacre
The Derby Canal promises to be an unlikely triumph of canal restoration, though it may take decades to accomplish.
The canal was built at the height of Canal Mania, between 1793 and 1796, engineered by the young Benjamin Outram (1764-1805), who had worked with William Jessop (1745-1814) on the Cromford Canal (completed 1794).
There were three branches, each connecting with the River Derwent in the centre of Derby: a line south joined the River Trent at Swarkestone; another ran north up the Derwent valley to Little Eaton, and the third went east to join the Erewash Canal at Sandiacre.
The Derby Canal did good business. The historian Charles Hadfield estimated that its total traffic in 1839 was around 200,000 tons annually.
Then, within a couple of years, the three branches of the Derby Canal were duplicated by the three railways that made Derby a railway town.
Somehow the Derby Canal, like its neighbour the Erewash Canal, remained independent of railway ownership, though generations of directors would have liked to unload the responsibility.
In 1872, when the company offered the canal to the Midland Railway for £90,000, the railway manager, James Allport, chose not to keep an appointment with the committee.
The canal branch to Little Eaton was formally abandoned in 1935.
Imperial Chemical Industries raised an objection to the canal company’s proposal to abandon the Sandiacre line in 1937.
Commercial traffic on the canal ended in 1945 and the following year the proprietors, anxious to avoid reopening the canal, locked the gates at Sandiacre against a commercial boat and its butty, Atlas and Vela.
As a result the canal was not included in the 1948 nationalisation that formed British Transport Commission.
A further protest cruise by the Inland Waterways Association in 1961 was thwarted when the canal company felled a tree across the lock at Sandiacre and chained the gates shut.
The canal company obtained a warrant for abandonment in 1964, and a year later a stretch of the canal bed at Breaston was sold for one shilling for the construction of the M1 motorway.
Just as the loss of the Euston Arch propelled the preservation of St Pancras Station, so the loss of the Derby Canal made local supporters of inland waterways all the more determined to preserve the Erewash Canal.
And because of the success of the Erewash Canal Preservation & Development Association (ECP&DA) the eventual restoration of the Derby remains practically possible, and thanks to the foresight and acumen of the Derby & Sandiacre Canal Trust, it looks likely that it will happen.
Apart from the M1 crossing, the only other section of the Derby Canal lost to redevelopment is in Derby city centre. Otherwise, though most of the waterway is dry, the land is available for restoration and protected by local-authority planning policies. Overbridges have been lowered and locks and the canal bed filled in but these changes are reversible.
Crucially, the Trust was in a position to find funds for a navigable culvert under the Derby Bypass at Swarkestone in 1996.
In 1998 the buried Borrowash Bottom Lock was excavated and partly restored, and since 2015 working parties have begun to return the lock and its adjacent half-mile pound to water. A length of waterway will be reinstated along the so-called “Golden Mile” at Draycott, where the Trust is restoring a group of canal cottages as a residential and commercial development.
The most exciting development of all is the Derby Arm, a thirty-metre high boat lift to convey boats between the canal and the navigable River Derwent giving access to the city-centre and Silk Mill – a solution to the impracticality of restoring the original Derwent crossing at the Holmes.
Comparable to the highly successful Falkirk Wheel (2002), this structure will be visible from a new visitor centre at the Derby Triangle, adjacent to Pride Park.
Staring at the blocked waterway at the Sandiacre Lock Cottages, where the Derby Canal joins the Erewash Canal, it seems unlikely that boats could ever again float under the bridge and into the currently buried Bottom Lock.
But they will. One day.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list includes a section on the Derby Canal and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.