Today we have the seventeenth episode of Peter Walter’s series of lockdown walks “being a compendium of idle facts, hidden places and meaningless historiana gathered on walks within easy striding distance of the writer’s abode – and beyond”.
Frozen in bronze, James Brindley looks a little wistful as he pores over the plan of Bridge No.1 on his new Coventry Canal.
As well he might. The great canal engineer saw the Coventry as a crucial arm of his grand plan to link up England’s canals, north and south. Yet the coal owners who had hired him to build it sacked him with only the first few miles open to traffic. He didn’t live to see it completed.
It’s quiet in the canal basin as he stands there. A little too quiet, really, for the basin has always struggled to convince as a buzzing, lively sort of place. But there is a hairdresser at work in one of the canalside units, and in the Baltic Food Store you can buy grub from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia.
Beyond Bridge No.1, eye-catching in a curvaceous kind of way (a Brindley trademark, apparently), the canal pulls away in a long slow left turn towards the Daimler power house, all that remains of Britain’s first car factory. Word has it that in those thrilling early days, workers who’d made a mess of the component they were trying to hammer into shape would quietly slip it into the canal, before a bowler-hatted foreman could tick them off.
These days, the only splashes around here are ducks launching themselves into the water, while the far side of the canal, not so long ago the backside of the City Engineers depot, is now a moderately attractive estate of new homes, complete with a linear park and tasteful railings. With Electric Wharf just across the water, it’s helped to lift this stretch of the waterway out of its post-industrial gloom into something a good deal more optimistic.
Not that the old realities have entirely been scrubbed away. A rat hurries along a concrete kerb under Bridge No.2 before seeking cover in a tangle of brambles, while the work of nameless graffiti warriors disfigures the 250-year-old brickwork. Who they are trying to impress in the dark and dingy corners they like to work in is anyone’s guess.
But willow, poplar and silver birch are beginning to form a leafy screen where once there were breeze block walls, there are water lilies on the water and more new homes rising where Courtaulds once had its own wharf to service all those vast factories.
On Priestley’s Bridge (aka Bridge No.4) an ornate metal plaque declares that ‘he rode into the canal, got out and jumped back in to get his bike’. Not sure who that refers to, but he’d have been in trouble if James Brindley had spotted him.