The strong links between historic parks and gardens and navigable canals are perhaps not immediately apparent, but they are actually rather pronounced. They are also rather varied, including canals near and within gardens, gardens on the canal network and on boats, and more besides. This post explores some of the highlights.

Bridgewater

No discussion of canals, parks, and gardens would be complete without reference to the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, starting with RHS Bridgewater, Salford. The historic context to this site is addressed in more detail here, but the focus in this post is on the garden’s links to canals.

RHS Bridgewater lies within the grounds of the former Worsley New Hall (1846), a replacement for ‘Brick Hall’, slightly to the north, which had been commissioned in 1760 by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. Brick Hall was itself a replacement for the seventeenth-century Worsley Old Hall, still further to the north within the estate, which the 3rd Duke occupied during the construction of the nearby Bridgewater canal.

He had been inspired by the canals seen on his Grand Tour, and determined to create his own to transport coal from his collieries to Manchester. The Bridgewater Canal Act 1758 first enabled ‘the most Noble Francis Duke of Bridgewater to make a Navigable Cut, or Canal, from a certain Place in the Township of Salford, to or near Worsley Mill and Middlewood in the Manor of Worsley, and to or near a Place called Hollin Ferry in the County Palatine of Lancaster’ (followed by further legislation as the route evolved). Often described as England’s first canal, it is more correctly described as the first canal designed as such from the outset – the legislation for the Sankey Brook Navigation was passed in 1755, and opened as a canal in 1757, so was strictly the first canal in England.

The Bridgewater Canal remains navigable, and is owned and operated by The Bridgewater Canal Company Limited (part of Peel L&P), in conjunction with the Bridgewater Canal Trust. As explained here, the canal’s distinctive orange colour stems from the iron in the local coal deposits – mining has allowed water to percolate into the bedrock, where the iron is oxidised, and more able to leach out of the rocks. As the canal runs underground and serves in part as drainage for the mines, the effect is widespread – though now also diluted through the use of nearby settling lagoons.

The canal borders RHS Bridgewater, and, as noted in an exhibition on the site, the RHS was keen to respect the ‘history and heritage of Bridgewater and its surrounds’. As a result, the layout of the Kitchen Garden:

… celebrates the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution – its waterways. The cut of the Bridgewater Canal and of local navigable underground canals at Worsley Delph inspired the arrangement of larger paths in the garden. This was overlaid with a historic Ordnance Survey map of local field boundaries of the 1890s – creating the smaller path and bed locations.

The Bridgewater link between gardens and canals is not limited to Salford, however. A monument in honour of the 3rd Duke – ‘father of inland navigation’ – was erected in 1832 in Hertfordshire, at the Grade II* Ashridge estate. The monument itself is listed at Grade II*.

The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (also the 6th Earl of Bridgewater) inherited Ashridge in 1748, later commissioning Henry Holland to build a new house, and Lancelot Brown to improve the parkland. By the early nineteenth century, however, the house was in disrepair, and the 3rd Duke decided to commission a replacement from James Wyatt. The Duke died in 1803, though, before the house was completed. Whilst the dukedom became extinct on his death, the earldom was inherited by a cousin, John William Egerton (died 1823). The 7th Earl of Bridgewater employed Humphry Repton to design the garden for the emerging house, also extending the designed landscape, and considering a memorial to the 3rd Duke. It was the 8th Earl, though, Francis Egerton (died 1829), whose will made the necessary funds available, and the neo-Classical column was erected in 1832:

This column was erected… in honour of Francis Third Duke of Bridgewater, who by devoting the energies of his mind to the accomplishment of the most splendid works of inland navigation opened a new field to national industry and rendered the most important services to the commercial interests of his country.

Canals Running Through Gardens

A number of registered parks and gardens have canals running through them. One such is Regent’s Park (Grade I), designed by John Nash at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as part of a wider masterplan which also included the Regent’s Canal and Regent’s Street. As a result, the canal is unusually well-integrated with the park, with, for example, the Broad Walk crossing the canal, and the line of the canal and the northern part of the Outer Circle running parallel. The canal’s nearest neighbour is now London Zoo, after the newly-formed Royal Zoological Society first acquired land within the site in 1828, later expanding to the land north of the canal. The zoo also occupies the site of a former stretch of the canal, as noted in the Register entry:

The park and its surroundings, particularly Nash’s terrace and villas, were severely damaged during the Second World War and rubble from damaged buildings was used to fill in the eastern arm of the Regent’s Canal, the reclaimed land later being made into a car park for the Zoological Gardens.

Sydney Gardens, in Bath (Grade II) were laid out in the 1790s as commercial pleasure grounds, opening in 1795. The Register entry notes that a section of the Kennet and Avon Canal was cut through the site a few years later:

The Kennet and Avon canal cuts from north to south through the eastern half of the Gardens. It is sunk below the level of the Gardens, with an iron bridge dated 1800 (listed grade II) carrying the main walk across it, and to the south of this, a single-span iron bridge (listed grade II) supporting a lesser path. Both bridges have fine decorative railings in the Oriental style and were cast in Coalbrookdale.

The canal’s ornamental bridges and tunnels proved to add to the charms of the gardens, but the subsequent insertion of the Great Western Railway in the mid-nineteenth century was perhaps a less charming addition. It did however result in the construction of two further bridges, to connect footpaths. The gardens were purchased by the Council in 1908, and opened to the public in 1913.

Seven registered parks and gardens with waterways within them or on their borders have in common that they are partly owned by the Canal & River Trust. The Trust was formed in 2012, and took on all of the assets and responsibilities of the former British Waterways Board (latterly British Waterways) in England and Wales. The Trust is ‘the UK’s largest waterways charity, looking after 2,000 miles of canals and rivers’. What may not be immediately apparent from this remit is the associated heritage responsibility: the Trust is the third largest owner of listed structures after the Church of England and the National Trust, and also owns all or part of 4 World Heritage Sites, 46 scheduled monuments, 6 registered battlefields, and the aforementioned registered parks and gardens (though it should be noted that the overlap between the registered area and the Trust’s ownership is generally very small).

It is a river that runs through the first of these registered parks and gardens, Newby Hall (Grade II*), near Ripon – specifically the River Ure Navigation, this portion of which was built in 1773. The Register entry for Newby Hall describes a probable seventeenth-century park, ‘laid out in the late C18 to a partially executed design by Thomas White’, with gardens dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Grade II Haslam Park, Preston, opened in 1910, with some later work by Thomas H Mawson. The Lancaster Canal (‘one of the country’s few coastal canals’, offering the longest stretch of lock-free canal in the country) runs round the northern boundary of the park, but is closely linked to it (and the Savick Brook, which the canal crosses via a short aqueduct. As the Register entry describes:

From the north end of the broad walk, paths lead round the north side of the park to join the south-west entrance, north-west over the Savick Brook to join the Canal, and north round the lake which lies close to the Canal, c 400m north of the south-east entrance. The water for the lake is supplied from an overflow of the Canal, entering the lake via a rockwork cascade which lies to the south of the aqueduct (1797, listed grade II) which carries the Canal over the Brook.

Dorfold Hall (Grade II), near Nantwich, has a nineteenth-century park and formal gardens by William Andrews Nesfield, bordered to the east by the Shropshire Union Canal. Shaped like a boot, Victoria Park (Grade II*), Hackney, is a nineteenth-century public park, proposed in 1840 as one of three new parks to serve the expanding population. It is bordered to east by the Hertford Union Canal, and to the south by the Regent’s Canal.

The Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal opened in 1799, but has been unnavigable since 1897 (with the exception of the recently reconstructed section at Bulbourne). It runs through the north-west portion of Halton House (Grade II), an estate bought in 1853 from Sir George Dashwood by Baron Lionel de Rothschild (and thereby becoming one of many Rothschild family homes in ‘Rothschildshire’, including the neighbouring Aston Clinton (Green) Park, now on Buckinghamshire’s Local Heritage List). In the latter part of the century, the next Baron built a new house to the south of the canal, and laid out formal gardens around it, with parkland to the north of the canal. The site is now in use as part of an RAF base.

Pishiobury (Grade II), in Hertfordshire, is a sixteenth-century garden with eighteenth-century Lancelot Brown park, bounded to the east by the River Stort. Also in Hertfordshire is Cassiobury Park (Grade II), through which the largely parallel Grand Union Canal and River Gade run north-south. The first Cassiobury House was built in the sixteenth century, and the last in 1800 (five years after the construction of the canal); the wider estate was variously worked on by Moses Cook, George London, Charles Bridgeman, Thomas Wright, and Humphry Repton. The Earl of Essex sold 75ha of the park for development in 1908, and the house in 1922 (it was demolished in 1927). As noted in the Register entry, the Council ‘gradually acquired a large part of the park and woodland during the 1930s, creating a public park east of the canal and a golf course to the west’. The most pronounced surviving feature in the park is the carriage drive from the eastern entrance.

Gardens Near Canals

The Canal & River Trust has also created a garden, at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port. The Museum includes the remaining four cottages from the original twelve erected as Porters Row in 1833, built to house dockworkers, and restored to their original appearance in 1983. These are now listed (Grade II), and furnished to reflect occupation in different eras (1830s, 1900s, 1930s and 1950s). To the rear is a charming cottage-style garden, designed to support wildlife, including herbs, fruit and vegetables, shrubs and perennials.

Gardens Alongside Canals

There are extensive gardens along the canals in Birmingham, where the towpaths are bounded by the water on one side, and flowerbeds and trees on the other. The towpath gardens are maintained by the ‘Wild in Birmingham’ volunteers, whose aim is to:

… provide a better habitat for insects, bees, birds and wildlife in the city centre and improve the diversity of species whilst also providing a pleasant environment for visitors to Birmingham and the local community as they enjoy walking and cycling beside the canal.

On the northern side of the canal, the gardens include the stretch from the Farmers Bridge locks on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal to just beyond the Roundhouse on the New Mainline. On the southern side of the canal, there are gardens between the two ends of Oozells Loop, and planters in Gas Street Basin. Specific areas within the gardens include sensory gardens, the Distillery and Roundhouse Gardens, the more sheltered Mediterranean Garden (with wooden bee sculpture), and Albert’s Memorial Garden, in honour of Albert Rooke, Birmingham’s last Inland Harbour Master.

The canalside gardens are also part of the ‘Great Canal Orchard’, intended ultimately to run for fifty miles from Wolverhampton to Worcester, and be the longest in the world, containing a mix of fruit trees (including rare historic varieties):

The trees will be planted at the back of our towpaths and will be used to fill in gaps to re-establish hedgerows and used to create a series of pocket orchards on adjoining land of between 10 and 300 trees.

Local communities and boaters alike will be encouraged to harvest the resulting crops, as boat families did two hundred years ago.

Gardens on Boats

Gardens also feature on canals, as well as alongside them. Many boats have a plant or two in a pot, but some make use of all available space. This was recognised in 2017 by the Canal & River Trust’s inaugural ‘Boats in Bloom’ awards, intended to ‘celebrate green-fingered boaters’ and thank ‘the many people who bring the waterways to life with plants and flowers’. The categories for the award included ‘most flower-filled boat’, ‘most edible growing boat’, and ‘most imaginative use of space’. On this last point, the options are many and varied: the roof (subject of course to considerations of height in relation to bridges and tunnels), bow, stern, and even, with some care, the sides.

Ornamental Canals

There is of course another link between gardens and canals, namely the canals intended to ornament gardens, rather than be navigable. As noted by Edward Martin (‘Garden Canals in Suffolk’ in East Anglian History: Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe, 2002):

These canals were not the waterways used by commercial barges, but were long and thin ponds that were decorative features in formal gardens – to make the distinction clearer I have called them ‘garden canals’.

Martin outlines the ‘complex’ origin of these garden canals, observing the undoubted influence of the French and Dutch canals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., Fontainebleau), and of the English ‘moats, fishponds and decorative meres of the middle ages’. He concludes that:

Although a canal-like feature appeared as early as 1609–29 in the design of the formal garden laid out… at Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, there can be no doubt that the fashion was really started by King Charles II.

By the early eighteenth century canals were a common feature in English gardens, but were soon to decline in popularity as landscape became more informal, and many existing canals were lost. A good few survive, though, some adjoining navigable waterways. The River Ure runs through the gardens at Newby Hall, as mentioned above, not far from the walled garden with its ornamental canal.

Conclusion

So, canals and historic parks and gardens are not such strange bedfellows. The long relationship between the two is set to continue, too, with over 600 miles of the Canal & River Trust’s canals being awarded Green Flag status, recognising them as ‘well-managed parks and green spaces’: blue and green space combine most harmoniously.