Batchworth Junction
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Rickmansworth Basin

"The Bridgewater Canal was Britain’s first true canal. Opened in 1761, it demonstrated the feasibility of using a man-made waterway to move heavy loads comparatively quickly over distance. A transport revolution then followed, and the many canals that were built to exploit this novel load moving ability were to become both cause and effect of the rapid industrialisation of the Midlands and the north of England. Better transport communication made centralised industrial manufacture viable and was thus an important factor in bringing about the transition from cottage industry to the factory system.
Completion of the Oxford Canal in 1790 provided a link between our growing canal network and London. However, the route was unsatisfactory; not only was it over-long, but the section that relied on the River Thames below Oxford was difficult to navigate. The need for a more direct and reliable waterway to link the Capital with the Midlands and the north of England led to the construction of the Grand Junction Canal.
At its northern end, the Canal forms a junction with the Oxford Canal at Braunston in Northamptonshire . It then follows a south-easterly course via Wolverton, Leighton, Tring and Uxbridge to reach the River Thames at Brentford, with an important branch from Hayes to Paddington."[1]
"The initial plan was to link Braunston in Northamptonshire (where there were other canal connections to Birmingham and the north) with the river Thames at Brentford. This would have served central London only via the river - a long way around. In 1794, long before the main line was complete, the company had the idea of a branch or "arm" from Bull's Bridge in west London to Paddington. Paddington was much closer to the heart of the capital and was served by the "New Road" connecting it with the City. Parliamentary powers were quickly sought for this extension and the process of buying land and negotiating with difficult landowners began. The Bishop of London proved especially difficult to deal with. The Paddington Arm opened on 10th July 1801, terminating in a 400 yard long basin, 30 yards wide, around which were wharves, a hay and straw market, sheds for warehousing, and pens for livestock. The Paddington Arm was a success and Paddington was soon a busy inland transhipment point, with goods being carried on to other parts of London on carts.
There was also a passenger boat service between Paddington and Uxbridge, the Paddington Packet Boat. Initially run by the company itself, with some success, the passenger boat service was let out, initially to a Henry Weeks, using wide beamed boats. After six months trial it was decided to switch to narrow beamed boats to solve problems of scouring, i.e. damage to the canal. The packet boat crews were noted for their smart crews wearing blue uniforms with yellow capes and yellow buttons. The Paddington packet seems to have been a well used passenger service which continued for a number of years."[2]
By 1800, the Canal was substantially complete, a short gap remaining between Stoke Bruerne and Blisworth where civil engineering problems with the long Blisworth Tunnel delayed final completion until 1805. For some years thereafter the Canal was very profitable, but from the 1840s onwards it fell into commercial decline as the mainline railways ? principally the London & Birmingham Railway ? gradually captured its long distance trade. Throughout the canal industry this second transport revolution forced companies to reduce their tariffs to barely economic levels to retain what business they could in the face of this new and voracious competition ? many went to the wall.
In 1894, the Grand Junction Canal Company bought two of the Leicestershire canals, their owners being on the verge of insolvency, thereby extending its domain to Leicester. Then, in 1929, the Company amalgamated with the Regent’s and Warwick canals to form the Grand Union Canal Company and bring under single ownership the waterway from Brentford and Limehouse on the Thames, to Birmingham. Further canal purchases in 1932 extended the network from Leicester to the River Trent and onwards to the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border. But despite a greater mileage of canals being brought under unified control and heavy investment in improvements, rail and increasingly road continued to dominate the transport industry. A growing shortage of boatmen prepared to accept the rigors of canal life added to the Company’s difficulties.
By the mid-1950s only the section of the Canal below Uxbridge remained commercially viable. A decade later, trade had diminished to negligible proportions, but by then canal carrying was being superseded by leisure cruising, a fact recognised in the 1968 Transport Act, which gave British Waterways a remit to develop our canals for leisure use. Today the Grand Union Canal (as it now is) carries more leisure traffic during the summer season than its predecessor did commercial traffic during its heyday as a major arterial highway.

The Grand Junction was the London's principal link with the rest of the UK's canal system. Although the somewhat circuitous route to Birmingham via the river Thames and the Oxford Canal came first, it was the Grand Junction Canal which really provided the transport infrastructure to bring goods from the industrial conurbations of the north and midlands to the capital. The Act of Parliament to authorise its construction was passed in 1793 and work started in the same year. The famous canal engineer William Jessop played a superintendent role as Chief Engineer, with James Barnes as the engineer responsible for most of the construction work. The Company's chairman was William Praed whose name is commemorated by the street named after him outside Paddington Station.
The canal opened from Braunston to Weedon on 21st June 1796, and a few weeks later it was extended as far south as Blisworth, where a long tunnel was under construction. Blisworth Tunnel and an embankment at Wolverton were not finished until March and August 1805 when the Grand Junction was opened as a through route for the first time. In the meantime goods had to bypass Blisworth Tunnel on a temporary railway, and at Wolverton a diversion via the river Ouse was required.
The Grand Junction was a busy route throughout its commercial life, although the struggle of competition with the railways was a constant problem from the mid 19th Century onwards. In the 1920's discussions took place between the Grand Junction, Regent's and Warwick Canal companies with a view to a merger.
In the 1930's the new company, now called the Grand Union Canal Company, worked hard to modernise both the canal and the boats operating on it. Locks were extensively rebuilt to take wide beamed barges, particularly on the Warwick Canal which had previously been for narrowboats only. There was financial support from the government for this work, which helped to relieve unemployment in the great depression of the 1930's. The company had a wide beamed motor barge built, the Progress, as an experiment with the intention of achieving greater efficiency to compete with railways and the growing alternative of road transport. They also tried out new designs of motor narrowboats which could pull an unpowered "butty". The Progress was not a success but the new designs of narrowboat were, and a large fleet was built for the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company, a subsidiary of the Grand Union Canal Company. One of these was Coronis, now in the London Canal Museum. [1]