Restoration
After a period of disuse following nationalisation in 1948, the first suggestions that the canal and others should be restored were made by the newly formed Inland Waterways Protection Society (IWPS) in 1959. However, the British Transport Commission presented their annual Bill in 1961, in which the Dudley Canal and Tunnel were scheduled to be closed immediately, with no provision to safeguard the route for future restoration. Both the Inland Waterways Association and the IWPS protested, but the protests were ignored, and closure occurred in 1962. Despite this, the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal Society explored the tunnel in mid-1963, after which a Dudley Tunnel Committee began running boat trips through it. These proved popular, and the Committee became the Dudley Canal Tunnel Preservation Society on 1 January 1964, eventually becoming the Dudley Canal Trust in 1970.
On 26 June 1970, the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Council, a government committee created in May 1968, held a press conference at which recommendations about the future of "remainder" waterways were made to the British Waterways Board. "Remainder" was a classification that indicated there was no obvious commercial future for the waterway. The recommendations included the returning to "cruiseway" status of nine canals, which included the Dudley Canal. The Waterways Recovery Group, formed in 1970 to co-ordinate volunteer involvement in canal restoration, began work on the canal later that year, raising public awareness of the canal and its potential as an amenity. In December 1970, the Birmingham Canal Navigations Working Party produced a report, which was published in early 1971. They recommended to the British Waterways Board that much of the Birmingham Canal system should be retained. Canals were grouped into four categories, the first two of which needed little action or expenditure to make them navigable again. The Dudley Canal was in the third category, where it was suggested that the local authorities through which the canals ran should be included in restoration plans. This plan of action had formed part of the 1968 Transport Act, and was adopted soon afterwards for the Dudley Tunnel Branch.
The renamed Dudley Canal Trust began to restore the canal. Over the weekend of 26–27 September 1971, they organised "Dudley Dig and Cruise", at which over 600 people cleared a lock chamber and two lock pounds of debris. In early 1972, Dudley Corporation announced that they would provide half of the cost of restoration, and that the Park Head end of the Tunnel would be landscaped as part of a derelict land regeneration scheme. Some 50,000 tons of mud were removed from the channel by dredging, and the locks reopened later that year. The Dudley tunnel was reopened at Easter 1973, at a ceremony attended by around 14,000 visitors. A short arm north of the tunnel was restored in 1977, as part of the Black Country Museum project. Funding for this was provided by the Job Creation Scheme run by the Manpower Services Commission, as a way to provide work and training for the unemployed. The Trust were able to use the museum as a base for their electrically powered trip boat, which by then had taken over 25,000 people into the tunnel since the start of trips in 1964.
Plans for the No. 2 Line moved forwards in 1980, when a boat rally was held at Hawne Basin, a former Great Western Railway interchange, where tubes were moved from boats to trains. The railway had closed in 1967, and the basin had been unused since then, but thirty boats attended the rally, and the Combeswood Canal Trust developed plans for turning it into a marina.
Part of the Lapal Tunnel was unearthed during the construction of the M5 motorway during the 1960s and the void was filled with concrete. The Lapal Canal Trust is working on the restoration of parts of the lost canal and to replace the tunnels with a completely new line, passing over the hill through Woodgate Valley Country Park.
In February 2012 plans for the regeneration of the Selly Oak area were submitted to Birmingham City Council which included a navigable section of canal from a new junction with the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to the recently reconstructed Harborne Lane bridge along the route of the former Dudley Canal.
Read more about this topic: Dudley Canal
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)
“Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)