Great article for those of who who are interested.
On a muggy Manchester morning, the trawl begins. Our nondescript metal barge is fronted by two huge empty rubbish bins. “This is a maintenance boat, but 95% of the time we’re cleaning up litter,” says Mike Sheldon, as we set off from Piccadilly Basin, which is wedged between Manchester’s Piccadilly train station and the glistening apartments of the city’s easterly expansions.
Our route is a nine-lock stretch of the Rochdale Canal that passes through the heart of Manchester city centre. Skimming up a football between cans and bottles, plastic bags and coffee cups, Sheldon – one of the boat’s two operatives – laments: “I love this city but, to Mancunians, the canals mean hardly anything at all.”
Built in 1776, the Rochdale Canal stretches for 32 miles, from the Calder and Hebble Navigation in West Yorkshire through to the Bridgewater Canal on the southern edge of Manchester city centre. Debris floating through the city’s streets often finds its final resting place in this stretch of the canal, turning it into a physical embodiment of the filthy habits of some its citizens and visitors.
“You mention it, we’ve found it,” says today’s other boat operative, volunteer lock keeper Ian McCarthy. “The best find we ever had was a safe that was still full of money,” he recalls with enthusiasm. “We took it to the police, nobody claimed it, so it ended up ours. We [the canal society] made a fortune.”
McCarthy’s relationship with the Rochdale Canal began as a teenager in the early 1970s, as he campaigned for a then-abandoned waterway to be fully restored for leisure use. His struggle was finally realised through millennium lottery funding in 2002.
It’s not just rubbish that is retrieved from the water. Since the canal’s reopening, both men have also had the unenviable task of recovering dead bodies from the water. So many have there been that, last January, local media reported extensively (and even live-blogged) the claims of a Birmingham City University professor, who said that 61 bodies found in the region’s canal and rivers over the past seven years must amount to foul play. The supposed serial killer responsible was excitedly dubbed “the Pusher”.
“It was a wonderful story … we thought it was great,” McCarthy says, sarcastically, as we pass under the distilled bars of Deansgate Locks, picking up indiscriminate debris thrown into the water – but absolutely no dead bodies. “It’s more likely that a bloke wanders down pissed as a fart, falls in and bangs his head. The big number of 61 is actually in a very large area, over a long period of time.”
Though the accusations were quickly shot down by police and city councillors alike, the damage to the reputation of Manchester’s waterways caused by the extensive media coverage was very real.
“If you search ‘Manchester’ and ‘boating’ on the internet, you’ll soon realise that somebody has had problems. There’s a bad reputation from a few small incidents,” McCarthy says. “In 40 years of tying my boat up in Manchester, I’ve had one incident – when two drunken girls and a bloke thought they would try to untie my boat. They were getting nowhere.”
Sheldon, smaller and more animated than his colleague, is blunter in his analysis: “What a complete load of bollocks it was.”
But the contents of the canal can still be depressing. In April, Mexican art collective TRES led more than 100 participants in a game in which pieces of rubbish were collected from the water and replaced by luminous balls fitted with a GPS chip. Points were awarded according to litter categories, and the balls tracked to map (anti-)social behaviour. More than 100 hypodermic needles were collected over the two days of competition.
Nonetheless, Sheldon – who was born in the canal-lining Manchester suburb of Droylsden – says he has seen major improvements in water quality, and reduced pollution levels since starting his full-time canal maintenance role a decade ago. “So I would say to the [Manchester] Evening News: ‘Come here, come out on the water and have a look.’”
Water Framework Directive classification system, the water quality of the Rochdale Canal in Manchester is now officially “good”, according to Cath Ferguson, environment manager at the Canal & River Trust – comparable with the Regent’s Canal in London. Proof of this improved water quality came in April when the world’s oldest angling club, the Salford Friendly Anglers’ Society, were granted permission to set their rods in the Rochdale Canal, counting pike, carp and eels among their catch.
The low levels of boat traffic – a sign of the canal’s almost-complete loss of non-leisure function – may help keep the water pollution low. In 1875, 500 boats passed through Manchester city centre every day, carrying somewhere around 870,000 tonnes of cargo with them each year. Over the whole of last year, just 400 are reckoned to have taken the same journey, almost exclusively for leisure reasons.
Without the considerations of the public, there is a limit to how far the canal can become part of city life in Manchester. The Canal and River Trust, which owns the Rochdale Canal alongside the city council and some private enterprises, is attempting to grow an “adoption scheme” that was launched three years ago.
The first of the two current city-centre adoption groups was formed by residents in and around Ancoats’s New Islington development, and sees up to 30 volunteers each month cleaning the towpath, collecting surface litter and planting hedges. “These people aren’t interested in the boats,” says Jon Stoop, leader of the Ancoats Canal adoption group. “They’re interested in their community.”
The residents have been joined in the private sector further downstream by law firm Eversheds, whose staff are encouraged to spend a number of hours maintaining the adopted stretch outside their office windows.
The canal’s ongoing transformation from wasteland to recognised asset has also gained the attention of Manchester’s rapidly changing architecture. Whereas the Rochdale Canal was originally hidden behind factories and warehouses facing the opposite direction, in disregard of a waterway functioning solely to transport coal and small freight between business, many of the city’s recent industrial regenerations and new developments have been constructed with balconies, patios and main entrances overlooking the water.
We recently appraised an apartment overlooking the canal at possibly £20,000 more than a similar apartment in the same building that faced the road,” says Rob Kenyon of Manchester estate agents Suttons City Living. “Recent canalside developments have all taken advantage of their location, offering balconies and terraces with water views.”
Since the 1980s, Mancunians have rediscovered an appreciation for city-centre living, creating a vibrant, balanced and prosperous hub ever further from the dank days of its post-industrial decline. Yet the lack of green space still remains one of the city centre’s greatest moaning points.
With a push of civic pride, a growth in volunteer hands and investment in towpath improvement and decoration, the ongoing cleanup of the Rochdale Canal could provide the escape from grinding urbanity that Manchester city centre’s residents, workers and visitors so badly want.
On a muggy Manchester morning, the trawl begins. Our nondescript metal barge is fronted by two huge empty rubbish bins. “This is a maintenance boat, but 95% of the time we’re cleaning up litter,” says Mike Sheldon, as we set off from Piccadilly Basin, which is wedged between Manchester’s Piccadilly train station and the glistening apartments of the city’s easterly expansions.
Our route is a nine-lock stretch of the Rochdale Canal that passes through the heart of Manchester city centre. Skimming up a football between cans and bottles, plastic bags and coffee cups, Sheldon – one of the boat’s two operatives – laments: “I love this city but, to Mancunians, the canals mean hardly anything at all.”
Built in 1776, the Rochdale Canal stretches for 32 miles, from the Calder and Hebble Navigation in West Yorkshire through to the Bridgewater Canal on the southern edge of Manchester city centre. Debris floating through the city’s streets often finds its final resting place in this stretch of the canal, turning it into a physical embodiment of the filthy habits of some its citizens and visitors.
“You mention it, we’ve found it,” says today’s other boat operative, volunteer lock keeper Ian McCarthy. “The best find we ever had was a safe that was still full of money,” he recalls with enthusiasm. “We took it to the police, nobody claimed it, so it ended up ours. We [the canal society] made a fortune.”
McCarthy’s relationship with the Rochdale Canal began as a teenager in the early 1970s, as he campaigned for a then-abandoned waterway to be fully restored for leisure use. His struggle was finally realised through millennium lottery funding in 2002.
It’s not just rubbish that is retrieved from the water. Since the canal’s reopening, both men have also had the unenviable task of recovering dead bodies from the water. So many have there been that, last January, local media reported extensively (and even live-blogged) the claims of a Birmingham City University professor, who said that 61 bodies found in the region’s canal and rivers over the past seven years must amount to foul play. The supposed serial killer responsible was excitedly dubbed “the Pusher”.
“It was a wonderful story … we thought it was great,” McCarthy says, sarcastically, as we pass under the distilled bars of Deansgate Locks, picking up indiscriminate debris thrown into the water – but absolutely no dead bodies. “It’s more likely that a bloke wanders down pissed as a fart, falls in and bangs his head. The big number of 61 is actually in a very large area, over a long period of time.”
Though the accusations were quickly shot down by police and city councillors alike, the damage to the reputation of Manchester’s waterways caused by the extensive media coverage was very real.
“If you search ‘Manchester’ and ‘boating’ on the internet, you’ll soon realise that somebody has had problems. There’s a bad reputation from a few small incidents,” McCarthy says. “In 40 years of tying my boat up in Manchester, I’ve had one incident – when two drunken girls and a bloke thought they would try to untie my boat. They were getting nowhere.”
Sheldon, smaller and more animated than his colleague, is blunter in his analysis: “What a complete load of bollocks it was.”
But the contents of the canal can still be depressing. In April, Mexican art collective TRES led more than 100 participants in a game in which pieces of rubbish were collected from the water and replaced by luminous balls fitted with a GPS chip. Points were awarded according to litter categories, and the balls tracked to map (anti-)social behaviour. More than 100 hypodermic needles were collected over the two days of competition.
Nonetheless, Sheldon – who was born in the canal-lining Manchester suburb of Droylsden – says he has seen major improvements in water quality, and reduced pollution levels since starting his full-time canal maintenance role a decade ago. “So I would say to the [Manchester] Evening News: ‘Come here, come out on the water and have a look.’”
Water Framework Directive classification system, the water quality of the Rochdale Canal in Manchester is now officially “good”, according to Cath Ferguson, environment manager at the Canal & River Trust – comparable with the Regent’s Canal in London. Proof of this improved water quality came in April when the world’s oldest angling club, the Salford Friendly Anglers’ Society, were granted permission to set their rods in the Rochdale Canal, counting pike, carp and eels among their catch.
The low levels of boat traffic – a sign of the canal’s almost-complete loss of non-leisure function – may help keep the water pollution low. In 1875, 500 boats passed through Manchester city centre every day, carrying somewhere around 870,000 tonnes of cargo with them each year. Over the whole of last year, just 400 are reckoned to have taken the same journey, almost exclusively for leisure reasons.
Without the considerations of the public, there is a limit to how far the canal can become part of city life in Manchester. The Canal and River Trust, which owns the Rochdale Canal alongside the city council and some private enterprises, is attempting to grow an “adoption scheme” that was launched three years ago.
The first of the two current city-centre adoption groups was formed by residents in and around Ancoats’s New Islington development, and sees up to 30 volunteers each month cleaning the towpath, collecting surface litter and planting hedges. “These people aren’t interested in the boats,” says Jon Stoop, leader of the Ancoats Canal adoption group. “They’re interested in their community.”
The residents have been joined in the private sector further downstream by law firm Eversheds, whose staff are encouraged to spend a number of hours maintaining the adopted stretch outside their office windows.
The canal’s ongoing transformation from wasteland to recognised asset has also gained the attention of Manchester’s rapidly changing architecture. Whereas the Rochdale Canal was originally hidden behind factories and warehouses facing the opposite direction, in disregard of a waterway functioning solely to transport coal and small freight between business, many of the city’s recent industrial regenerations and new developments have been constructed with balconies, patios and main entrances overlooking the water.
We recently appraised an apartment overlooking the canal at possibly £20,000 more than a similar apartment in the same building that faced the road,” says Rob Kenyon of Manchester estate agents Suttons City Living. “Recent canalside developments have all taken advantage of their location, offering balconies and terraces with water views.”
Since the 1980s, Mancunians have rediscovered an appreciation for city-centre living, creating a vibrant, balanced and prosperous hub ever further from the dank days of its post-industrial decline. Yet the lack of green space still remains one of the city centre’s greatest moaning points.
With a push of civic pride, a growth in volunteer hands and investment in towpath improvement and decoration, the ongoing cleanup of the Rochdale Canal could provide the escape from grinding urbanity that Manchester city centre’s residents, workers and visitors so badly want.