History of Basingstoke Canal

The Basingstoke Canal was conceived as an agricultural waterway to connect the area of North East Hampshire with the London markets. An act of parliament was applied for and received Royal Assent on the 15th May 1778 to empower the Company of Proprietors to build a navigable waterway from the town of Basingstoke to the river Wey at West Byfleet.

The Canal took seven years to construct with construction starting in 1787 and being completed in 1794, which entailed a bridge where any public highway crossed the Canal, 29 locks to raise the Canal from the River Wey up to the plateau in Hampshire which was 245ft above sea level, a tunnel at Greywell which was 1200 yards long and took the Canal through the hill under Butterwood.

The Canal was moderately successful in its early years, the years during the Napoleonic wars, as coastal traffic was disrupted in the Channel due to French naval action and therefore most goods which originally were taken by coastal sailing ship were being transported by land means. Competition with the railways in the 1840’s meant that the Canal lost most of its lucrative small goods traffic which was attracted to the faster more modern railway. The building of Aldershot Camp in the late 1850’s gave the Canal a brief boost but once the Camp was up and running the Canal Company became insolvent and the Canal was run for some years by the Official Receiver.

A whole series of entrepreneurial owners then took the Canal over, trying to make money from pleasure boat hire, trying to sell water and a limited amount of commercial carrying continued. During the 1914 – 18 war, the canal was taken over and run as part of the inland water transport system under the overall control of the Royal Engineers and carried very large amounts of materials and military stores to Aldershot, Crookham and Deepcut Camps along the Canal. With the end of the First World War in 1918, traffic slowly declined again and the Canal was sold in 1923 to a private owner who was moderately successful in retaining traffic on the lower reaches to Woking.

As the Second World War got under way, traffic patterns on the rivers and canals were changed and disrupted as most imports came into west country ports rather than the traditional Port of London.

At the end of the Second World War, traffic had declined to such a point that the Canal was sold to its last private owner in 1949. The New Basingstoke Canal Company , as it was called, tried to manage the Canal by selling fishing tickets, encouraging houseboat moorings and encouraging unpowered pleasure craft to use the Canal but slowly the backlog of maintenance overwhelmed the company and by 1964 the Canal was almost totally derelict.

The Canal was perceived to be an eyesore in the late 1960’s. A group of residents in Brookwood, near Woking, wrote to the owner of the Canal asking if they could work on the Canal at weekends voluntarily to help clean it up. However, The New Basingstoke Canal Company had other plans for the Canal. They wished to sell off the dry sections piecemeal for development.

The group of residents formed themselves into an action group and re-named themselves as the Surrey and Hampshire Canal Society. They actively campaigned for the Canal to be taken over into public ownership and restored as a public amenity as the towing path was still almost continuous for thirty two miles of the Canal’s length. The section from Greywell Tunnel to Basingstoke had been abandoned and partially filled in many years before and it was only considered possible to restore the towpath and possibly the canal to navigation from Greywell Tunnel to the River Wey.

On 15 September 1968 during a period of exceptionally heavy rain, the Canal burst in two places. One at Farnborough, flooding out the first day of that years Farnborough Air Show and the second burst at Aldershot which luckily did little damage but left a gaping hole in the Ash embankment which everybody felt would be impossible to restore. These events focused minds wonderfully and the local Authorities realised that the Canal being a man-made navigation could not just be forgotten about, it would either have to be purposely eliminated or restored to a condition to make it safe.

A committee looked at all the various options and it was eventually decided that the most sensible option would be to restore it to full navigable condition. This decision was arrived at when one considers that large amounts of storm water had been diverted into the Canal during its working life from road drains, camp parade grounds, railway line drainage etc. and at certain times of the year the Canal did provide a useful drainage facility. If the Canal was to be eliminated, all these winter flows would have to be diverted into the road drainage system and it was obvious that this would not be able to cope. The Canal could have been restored by just weiring the locks but this would have precluded any income from navigation and would have left the canal with 29 isolated duck ponds, although the towpath would still retain its pleasant canal side character.

The Report recommended that the canal should be restored for through navigation by visiting holiday boats from the River Wey but due to the important natural history interest in the Canal, the numbers of boats using it should be restricted.

Possession of the Canal under the Compulsory Purchase Order was obtained by Surrey County Council and Hampshire County Council in 1974 and restoration work started using large numbers of volunteers and County staff on clearing the towpath to make it available for walkers and then clearing the channel of fallen trees and most obstructions, ready for dredging to commence. Most of the major engineering works were on the Surrey half of the Canal which included the restoration of twenty-eight locks.

The Surrey and Hampshire Canal Society purchased a floating steam dredger and set about restoring it to use for dredging from Odiham to Fleet, taking some nineteen years to complete the task. The section from Fleet to Aldershot, some five miles, was dredged by County Council contractors.

On 10 May 1991 the Canal was officially re-opened by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, the whole project having been a partnership between both County Councils and the Canal Society. The Canal Society had supplied millions of hours of voluntary labour with the County Councils providing the funding, materials and logistical backup. The restoration was given a considerable boost by several job creation schemes employing many young people working on the restoration of the locks during the week and volunteers working at weekends.

As the Canal was now open for visiting boats, the County Councils realised that it would not be possible to run it in two halves so both County Councils decided that the Canal would be managed and maintained by the Basingstoke Canal Authority under a joint management committee. And this is how the situation stands to the present day.