Contested Waters: Measuring and mapping water supplies during Britain’s canal mania

The Centre for Water Cultures team invites you to a seminar from:

Professor Simon Naylor, University of Glasgow

During the 1790s much of Britain was gripped by ‘canal mania’ – the rush to both build and invest in canals. These canals were built to allow the movement of basic resources like coal or lime and manufactured good like textiles to and from industrialising towns and ports. This mania was particularly intense across northern England. Canal building, along with the construction of factories and mills, port and harbours, bridges and land drainage, was a crucial component of the work of civil engineers and surveyors, an increasingly prominent cadre of actors who were actively re-shaping the British landscape, society and economy.

This paper focuses on the development of one canal project in the 1790s – the Rochdale Canal – and work by a number of civil engineers and surveyors, most notably the Scottish engineer, John Rennie. The Rochdale Canal was proposed to link up Liverpool and the Lancashire manufacturing towns with Leeds and Hull. The project was soon mired in controversy, when prominent millowners and landowners complained that the proposed canal would consume and drain the surrounding water courses and deny their water wheels a power source. Applications for Acts of Parliament were denied twice before being finally granted in 1794. The paper analyses the ways in with Rennie and other resident engineers and surveyors, some acting on behalf of the millowners, went about mapping and measuring water courses and availability; developing new environmental knowledge about precipitation and hydrology; applying those knowledges to calculate the impacts the projected canal would have on supply to mills; and so ultimately adjudicate both for or against the canal’s progress.

Biography:

Simon Naylor is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book is The Observatory Experiment: Meteorology in Britain and its Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

The Seminar will be held online, please email eei@hull.ac.uk if you would like a Teams link to join the meeting.