Hunt for profits is sucking canals dry Our wonderful canal
system has been systematically run down as the land
alongside its towpaths is snapped up by developers, writes
Illtyd Harrington I AM having what Brecht, the German
playwright, called “a long anger”, caused by
watching nearly 40 years of life whittled away. Few people
in this country did more than myself to advance the cause
for retaining and developing our canals and waterways
systems. No, I am not a vain, superannuated septuagenarian,
but someone who cares about the environment and did
something about it. Don’t bore me with talk about a
stealth tax. I’ll give you my undivided attention if
you wish to discuss the creeping advance of the big, and I
mean big, property developers who are steadily encroaching
onto public land – land which has become more
attractive and valuable near water because of mine and
other people’s efforts. Of course they beat their
breasts and plead that their sole aim is to earn a few
honest shillings from these prime sites and to gladly share
the bonanza with the locals in affordable housing plus
planning gain. Perhaps not opening an Olympic sized
swimming pool, more likely a grotty bingo hall.
They’ve changed the tune but they sang the same song
through the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s. Look
them with challenge in your eye and like caught-out kids
you’ll get, “Not me, guv. I too, like yourself,
believe in public amenities.” If you believe that,
you must think Adolf was a saint. That’s where I come
in. Way back in the 1960s, four of us met in a house in St
Mark’s Crescent. One later rose to become the Head of
the Countryside Commission, another town planner with a
radical imagination eventually married Lord David
Sainsbury. Before a very senior civil servant in the
Department of the Environment got to work within
government, our own counter-intelligence, elegant Whitehall
mandarins contemptuously referred to us as “The
Bargees”. Our efforts culminated in a large section
of Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act, being devoted
to maintaining the derelict and ignored system of 2,000
miles of waterways. She was determined to give it a
feature. She got me to join the British Waterways Board and
chair the Nationwide Advisory council on their future. My
job, defined by her, was to awaken and capture gathering
interest. No Jesuit missionary had a more satisfying task
as I sallied forth into the lofty and craggy islands that
surrounded the majestic Caledonian canal to the grime and
filth around Manchester. I marched on with my army of
advisors. We staked out our support to restore the
incredible rural splendour of the Kennet-Avon canal, now
achieved from Bristol to Reading. And the noble Mon and
Brec, 618 feet high in the Brecon Beacons amongst many
more. But it was London where we won a major battle to open
the enclosed 20-mile towpath, now lined by narrow boats
festooning it like Christmas decorations. There is
unlimited towpath walking from Paddington to the West.
After my appointments by Castle to the appropriate boards,
I was sacked as a nuisance by the incoming government of
Edward Heath, but later reappointed by Harold Wilson. At
the Greater London Council (GLC), we had a committee where
the nine boroughs which run alongside the Grand Union
Regent’s Canal met. There was enormous local interest
throughout London. Of course it was satisfying to see
President Bill Clinton having a pint in the pub in the
restored Gas Street Basin during a break in the G7 summit.
Birmingham has more canals than Venice. Some of my
successors argued, reasonably, for a more balanced form of
development. No-one fancies being permanently dressed up in
the traditional 19th-century clothes of canal people, shod
in clogs, caps or frilly bonnets, but those long and greedy
fingers grab restlessly for profits first. What was all
that quaint language about a great historic tradition and
the concept of blending old and new? Well, this grumpy old
man is bitter that ideas of marrying urban and rural
tranquillity are being spuriously brushed aside, be it in
the Islington Basin, or elsewhere, justified by the claim
of affordable housing – a term which defies
definition. Who, I ask, gains most in planning gain?
Meanwhile, the office of the Deputy Prime Minister has cut
the annual grant to the British Waterways board. The same
John Prescott, who as far back as 1971 advised me after my
dismissal by the Tories that Barbara Castle’s legacy,
would be safe with a future Labour government – a
government, alas, which embraces the omnipotence of market
forces. They will have little bother in reconciling
themselves with the seductive voice of the developers,
anxious to fill the vacuum in a buyer’s market. This
is the day of the locust. We need no lessons in
asset-stripping. Some of the most desirable sites in London
and the UK lie alongside our waterways. But are they ours
anymore? A vicious bloodbath has taken place on sites near
the Olympic Village, near the river Lea. Some of the
participants would qualify for membership of the Mafia. A
few honourable district surveyors of my intimacy speak of a
“Wild West approach”. No-one in government
seems to care. They are stealing our land for themselves. A
hundred years ago the Liberals used to sing a hymn:
“God gave the land to the people.” I hope
he’s watching them and us, so we can get it back.
• ILLTYD Harrington was a member of the British
Waterways board for a period of 12 years, and the first
chairman of the National Advisory Body.