Join Dan Snow on an adventure through beautiful scenery, industrial landscapes and epic engineering, to discover a story that shaped the modern world.
Dan travels by narrowboat across the canals of England and Wales to explore a transformation in transport and time. Over just a few decades, journey times were compressed as canals supercharged the industrial revolution - it was called Canal-Mania.
As part of his journey Dan investigates a series of remarkable conservation projects being run by the Canal and River Trust. It’s a chance to get a hands-on look at some amazing engineering, from the historic flight of locks at Stoke Bruerne, to the incredible boat-carrying aqueduct at Pontyscyllte, known as ‘the stream in the sky’. These fascinating projects reveal a century of canal-mania, from their earliest years in the 1760s and 70s, when they were dug to shift coal and drive forward the ceramics industry of the Potteries, right through to the gigantic Anderton boat lift, dubbed “the cathedral of the canals”, a massive engineering solution to the challenges of geography.
Dan looks into the stories of the people who inspired and designed the canals in Georgian and Victorian Britain - famous names like Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Brindley, Thomas Telford - and the armies of humble navvies who did the dirty work, digging out miles of waterways by hand. Today's modern engineers are working in the footsteps of all of them, preserving a living piece of history, 250 years old and still in use today!
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To make this special film, History Hit worked closely with the Canal & River Trust - you can find out more about their work and the network they maintain at:
https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/
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