Page updated 1 July 2002
The History of the Canal
Early Years
The Huddersfield Narrow Canal was built following an enabling Act of Parliament passed in 1794. Four years later the first traffic was using both sections either side of the Standedge Tunnel. This took until 1811 to be completed.
By the time the tunnel was open the "railway age" was upon us and the canal was not a financial success. As with so many other canals, the company was bought by the local railway company, the Huddersfield to Manchester. Following this, it suffered the inevitable decline and the canal was officially abandoned in 1944, having seen the last commercial traffic pass through Standedge Tunnel in 1921.
With canals no longer viable for commercial transport and leisure boating still to become widely popular, it is hardly surprising that parts of the canal were filled in and used as building sites and bridges were lowered to speed road traffic. With the canal no longer navigable, many locks were then dismantled.
Restoration
The Huddersfield Canal Society was formed in 1974, with the aim of restoring the canal. Initially, volunteer working parties were active in making good some of the locks and dredging parts of the canal but, clearly, volunteer labour and local fund raising was never going to be enough to bring back major blockages.
These major blockages included Standedge Tunnel, which alone was estimated to cost £5m to restore. In Huddersfield, as recently as 1986, the owners of Bates and Sellers Mills had been permitted to extend their buildings over the line of the canal. There were a number of other sites along the length of the canal where realignment would be necessary to avoid recent building, as well.
A change of strategy was required. The Society realised that it was vital to stop further degradation of the remaining canal and after some campaigning got all the local authorities, Tameside, Oldham and Kirklees, to adopt the policy of not permitting further building on the line of the canal. That helped, but by now estimates of restoring the canal had risen to £30m.
With so much interest in the project, not just from the boating lobby, but also those concerned for local history, industrial archeology and even those who saw the canal as an opportunity to provide a "linear park" through the area for more general recreation purposes, the next step was the formation of the Huddersfield Canal Company. This body had five partner organisations, the Canal Society, British Waterways and the three local authorities.
By now the project had become a candidate for funding through the Millennium Commission. In the end this body provided £15m of the money and English Partnerships £13m. The remaining sums coming from the local authorities.
One can understand why it was dubbed the "Impossible Restoration" by some in the canal restoration movement. The total project involved, dredging 3km of the existing canal and creating 2.1km of new channel, building 14 new locks and 12 new bridges and an incredible 5.4km of tunnel restoration.
The Canal Now
Reopened for traffic, on a gloriously sunny May Day in 2001, the canal now boasts a Visitors Centre, "The Standedge Experience", based in an old warehouse. This was originally used, before the tunnel was complete, to store goods ready for transhipment by road over the hill to the bottom of the Diggle flight.
With the reopening of the canal, once again Standedge can claim its place as the highest (645ft above sea level), deepest (638ft underground) and longest (3¼ miles) navigable tunnel in the country. Although Standedge Tunnel may be the centrepiece, boaters will surely remember the 74 locks they pass through in its twenty mile length, including the only lock (24E) on the narrow waterway system with a guillotine gate.