On this date in 1894, Queen Victoria opened the Manchester Ship Canal. 10 things you might not know about it:
First of all, what is it? The Manchester Ship Canal is a 36 mile (58 km) inland waterway in the North West of England which runs from Eastham on the Mersey estuary to Salford in Greater Manchester. It uses the routes of the rivers Mersey and Irwell.
It is the longest river navigation canal and the world's eighth-longest ship canal, only slightly shorter than the Panama Canal in Central America.
It was built to reduce the time and cost of transporting goods from the port at Liverpool to Manchester. It allowed ocean going ships to sail directly to the centre of Manchester. Hence Manchester became Britain’s third busiest port despite being 40 miles (64km) from the sea.
Construction began in 1887; it took six years and cost £15 million (equivalent to £1,774,553,339 in 2021). Construction was overseen by contracting engineer Thomas Walker. He divided the 36 mile (58km) route into 8 sections, putting an engineer in charge of work on each.
Up to 17,000 labourers (also known as navvies) worked on digging the canal. Many of them had come from Ireland. It was hard work and very dangerous. Navvies were paid the equivalent of around £19 for a 10-hour working day. It’s estimated that as many as 1,100 navvies lost their lives, a common cause of death was being buried by a landslide. It was considered more dangerous to be a navvy than to serve in the British Army. However, accommodation and hospitals were provided. In 2022 it was announced that a memorial to the workers would be created, including a forest of 600 trees native to Britain and Ireland planted close to the canal.
The ship canal was flooded in November 1893, and opened for traffic from 1st January 1894. During the opening ceremony the following May, Queen Victoria knighted two people: the Mayor of Salford, William Henry Bailey, and the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Marshall.
The canal is sometimes nicknamed The "Big Ditch".
At its peak in 1958, the amount of freight carried by the canal was almost 20,000,000 tons.
It has an aqueduct, seven swing road bridges, five high level railway viaducts, four high level road bridges and five sets of locks.
In the 1990s there was a rumour that the canal was so polluted the council had to warn people not to smoke next to it, in case they ignited poisonous gases coming from the water.
New!!!
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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