The Bradford Canal

by John Allison, historian and writer, Bradford

What has Bradford Canal to do with Bradford Beck?

It was a marriage of convenience. Like many marriages it ended in an acrimonious divorce.

In 1770 Bradford Beck was a very pleasant, clean stream running down Bradford Dale through the town and down the valley to join the River Aire at Shipley. None of it was covered except by a few bridges. For many years it had powered local corn mills along its length. It must have been very pretty and have had a good stock of fish.

The canal was planned and built in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Originally it used water from Bowling Beck, a tributary of Bradford Beck that joins it in the city centre. This soon proved insufficent. The canal owners decided to dam Bradford Beck where it passed the side of the canal basin below the Cathedral ( then St. Peter`s Parish Church). This would raise the beck`s level to that of the canal basin.

In the nineteenth century Bradford became the centre of the wool textile industry. As first water powered mills used the beck water to drive water wheels to power machinery, later using water to drive the engines when steam power was introduced. The textile processes involved washing and dyeing the wool prior to spinning and weaving, and used vast quantities of water. The waste water went back into the beck. A nineteenth century map shows one corn mill, a brewery, two woolcombing mills (using water to wash the wool before combing it), and five dyeworks,all adjacent to the beck, from Cemetery Road to Norcroft Street. Besides this industrial pollution the population of Bradford grew very rapidly between 1800 and 1850. There were no proper sewers and the beck was the only way to dispose of human waste.

By 1850 the beck was known as "The Mucky Beck" and the canal was called "River Stink". The best way to hide the sewer that the beck had become was to put it underground and virtually all of it in the town centre was culverted.

The foul state of the town`s watercourses caused much concern. In those days it was thought that diseases were caused by bad smells. By 1849 many regarded the canal as a public nuisance. Mills along it used canal water to feed their boilers and the hot waste water was returned to the canal. 406 people died in 1849 of cholera. Letters in the papers called for the canal to be closed. Nothing was done as many businesses relied on the canal, either for transport or water. Eventually some industrialists in the town, not dependent on the canal for transport (the railway came to Bradford in 1844), formed a committee to force some action. They suggested that the use of Bradford Beck's water by the canal was illegal. Eventually the council went to Court and in 1865 the case was heard at the Yorkshire Spring Assizes. The Canal Company defended themselves on the grounds that the problem was the Beck, which should be cleaned up They lost the case. An appeal was made to the House of Lords and on March 22nd 1866 Vice Chancellor, Sir W. Page Wood, granted an injunction against the canal from taking water from the Beck. The divorce was complete.

The Bradford Canal was resurrected in May 1st 1872 under new owners. It was shortened, with a new terminus at North Brook Bridge. No water was taken from the beck. it was fed by water pumped back up from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal junction at Shipley. That canal closed in 1922.

But in the 21st century there are proposals to rebuild the third Bradford Canal. Maybe Bradford Beck`s water will feed the new canal again!