An original and tattered copy of the Newbury Weekly News Centenary Supplement dated February 1967 has recently been discovered in Hungerford Town Hall. It contains the following article by David Barnes.

Newbury has seen many changes, mainly for the better, over the past 100 years, but one for the worse, in the opinion of many people, has been a steady decline in the use and maintenance of the Kennet and Avon Canal.

Gone for ever, but nor forgotten, are the days when a fleet of barges carrying thousands of tons called at Newbury every year as they plied between Reading and Bath on this once-important inland waterway linking the Thames with Avonmouth.

Older readers will recall the time when supplies were regularly unloaded for coal merchants at the Wharf and West Mills, corn was brought in from the farms to Dolton’s Mill and large quantities of gravel, sand and other building materials were invariably moved by barge.

Today, Newbury is one of the few places where the canal is still fully navigable for a few miles in each direction. Elsewhere, it is now a quiet backwater choked with weeds and rushes, but still a potentially valuable amenity appreciated most by fishermen and a band of enthusiasts dedicated to its eventual restoration.

Completed in 1810, it was hailed at the time as a masterpiece of civil engineering, consisting of 87 miles of waterway with 106 locks, 29 of them within 2½ miles at Devizes – and an aqueduct over the River Avon about a mile from Limpley Stoke.

For the next 30 years, the canal lived up to expectations that it would be a profitable commercial undertaking. In its heyday, 300,000 tons of merchandise passed along the canal, bringing prosperity to landowners, manufacturers, merchants and tradesmen who lived along the route and revenue of £70,000* in one year, 1832, to the owners, the Kennet and Avon Canal Company.

But by 1840, this golden era was drawing to a close. The advent of the Great Western Railway brought severe competition and a battle for survival between the railway promoters and the canal company.

Long struggles through the House of Commons and the Lords ended in 1851 when the Great Western Railway bought out the canal shareholders for less than a fifth of the million George III gold sovereigns it cost to build with the undisguised object of eliminating all competition.

From 1918 onwards the condition of the canal deteriorated to such an extent that the time taken to navigate it practically eliminated all commercial traffic.

The railway company continued, however, to pursue a policy of discouraging traffic to such an extent that before nationalisation there was rarely a canoe or rowing boat seen on the canal at Newbury.

With nationalisation in 1947, management of the canal became the responsibility of British Waterways. Its commercial use revived for a while, but in May 1950 it finally ceased completely when the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive closed a section between Reading and Newbury, ostensibly to repair some of the locks.

A second attempt in 30 years to close the canal, this time by the British Transport Commission in 1955, again met with widespread opposition. After protests and a petition, Parliament decreed that the canal must not be allowed to deteriorate beyond the state into which it had fallen.

In recent years, report has followed report in defence of the Kennet and Avon, but despite the thousands of words on the value of the canal as an amenity, its future is still uncertain.

The Kennet and Avon Canal Trust, who for years have been campaigning for the complete restoration of the canal, recently showed what could be done by rebuilding a derelict lock at Sulhamstead with prisoners and soldiers carrying out the work under the supervision of the British Waterways inspector at Newbury. This project was carried out so successfully that the Trust hope to repair other disused locks.

* over ten million pounds in today’s money

Readers may know that the K and A canal was eventually restored and opened by the late Queen in 1990 – I will write about its restoration in the next issue of Canalsonline.