Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Canal Mania: Did the Canal Towns Boom, and Do They Still Lead?

Pale duck-egg title card reading "Canal mania" in black and red beside a map of the canal network of England and Wales in greens and red, with red and blue circles for the largest towns of 1801, and the line "The typical canal town grew 4.0 times over from 1801 to 1861. Today they are bigger, but not richer."

Between 1760 and 1830 England dug a network of canals. The towns they reached boomed. But were the canals the cause, and is there anything left of that lead today? I dated the network and followed England’s biggest towns from 1801 to 2021 to find out.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Like most people in Lancashire, I tend to think of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal as a towpath for a Sunday walk. Two centuries ago it was the motorway of the mill towns. Blackburn, Burnley and Wigan grew up along it. So did a story: the canals made the industrial North.

It is a good story, and it is hard to test. Canal companies needed traffic, so they dug towards coalfields, ports and busy manufacturing towns. A town on a canal might have grown because of the canal. Or the canal might have come because the town was already growing. I tried to pull those apart with open data, and the answer is more interesting than the legend.

A network dug in seventy years

I took 3,884 km of canal from OpenStreetMap and matched it, name by name, to Wikipedia’s list of UK canals and their opening years. That dated 77% of it by length. The result is a picture of a building boom: 84% of the dated length belongs to canals finished between 1760 and 1830, and the busiest decade was the 1790s, the years remembered as canal mania, with 586 km finished and 44 canals completed.

Map of England and Wales showing the canal network in green, mostly finished between 1760 and 1830, with red circles for the canal towns of 1801 clustered in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands and blue circles for other large towns, mostly ports and old county towns
The canal network coloured by the year its canal was finished, with England’s 29 largest towns of 1801 other than London. Red: canal towns (within 2 km of a canal of 1830 or earlier). Blue: other towns.
Bar chart of kilometres of canal finished per decade from the 1700s to the 1890s, rising steeply from the 1760s to a peak in the 1790s and falling away after 1830
Dated canal length by the decade its canal was finished.

The interactive version animates this decade by decade, with the canals turning red in the year they open. One warning: the list gives one year per canal, normally the year the whole line was finished, so long canals like the Leeds and Liverpool (dated 1816) appear later than their first stretches did.

The canal towns did boom

To compare like with like I started from the 29 largest towns in England in 1801, leaving London aside. 14 of them sat within 2 km of a canal open by 1830. Between 1801 and 1861 those canal towns grew by a median of 4.0 times. The rest grew by at most 2.7 times. (At most, because the 1861 rankings stop at the top 30, so a town that fell out of them could only have grown so much.) England as a whole grew about 2.0 times between 1801 and 1851.

Horizontal bar chart of growth from 1801 to 1861 for 29 towns, with red canal towns such as Stoke-on-Trent, Sheffield and Liverpool near the top and blue towns such as Norwich, Bristol and York near the bottom, though Sunderland, Oldham and Bolton in blue are also near the top
Population in 1861 divided by population in 1801. Hatched bars are upper bounds for towns that fell out of the 1861 top 30.

But look at who the other towns are. 6 of the 15 are on the coast, and most are old cathedral, county and port towns: Norwich, York, Exeter, Chester, Bristol. The canal towns are the new industrial places of the North and Midlands. And the fastest grower of all, Sunderland, had no canal; it is a coal port. Two cotton towns, Oldham and Bolton, also count as “other” in my data because their canal branches are not dated in my sources.

They were rising before the canals came

Here is the test I care about most. The same Wikipedia article ranks England’s largest towns in 1662, a century before the first big canal. Of the 14 canal towns of 1801, only 3 were in that 1662 top 30. Of the 15 other towns, 11 were. That gap is very unlikely to be chance (p = 0.009).

Left: bar chart showing 3 of 14 canal towns but 11 of 15 other towns were in the 1662 top 30. Right: slope chart from 1750 to 1801 in which Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield climb steeply past Bristol
Left: how many of each group were already big in 1662. Right: the six provincial towns with estimates for 1750, eleven years before the Bridgewater Canal.

Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield are all missing from the 1662 table. By 1750, before any of the big canals, they already had between 12,000 and 24,000 people each. The canal towns were the boom towns of the eighteenth century first, and the canals followed them.

The canals were dug to towns that were already booming.

That does not mean the canals did nothing. Cheap coal and cheap carriage must have helped. But with these data I cannot say how much of the 4.0 against 2.7 gap the canals caused. And there is a second suspect: the railways, which arrived from 1830 and were everywhere by 1861. I have no railway data here, so the canal age and the railway age are mixed together.

Bigger today, but not richer

Two centuries on, the canal towns of 1801 have grown a median of 10.2 times to their 2021 built-up areas, against 6.9 times for the others. Size has stuck. Wealth has not. Using the ONS estimates of household income for the year to March 2023, and allowing for size in 1801, the coast and the North, the canal towns come out about 6.9% poorer.

Scatter plot of 1801 population against 2021 built-up area population on log scales for 29 towns, with red canal towns such as Birmingham and Manchester mostly above the blue towns of similar 1801 size
Population in 1801 and in the town’s 2021 built-up area, both on log scales.

The same holds across all 884 towns and cities in England and Wales with at least 10,000 people. The 272 with a canal of 1830 or earlier within a kilometre of their edge are about 54% bigger than other places in their region, and once size is allowed for, about 2.7% lower in household income. Canal places are poorer than their neighbours in 6 of the 9 regions where both kinds exist.

Bar chart of the difference in median household income between canal places and other places by region, positive in the East of England, South West and Wales and negative in the other six regions
Median household income of canal places against other places, towns of 10,000 or more, by region.

Along the Leeds and Liverpool

Back to Lancashire. Blackburn grew from 11,980 people in 1801 to 129,200 in 1900. Burnley was not in the tables at all until 1900, when it had 97,000. Today Blackburn, Burnley and Wigan rank 701, 825 and 743 of 884 places for household income. Of the 30 towns of 10,000 or more along the canal, 26 are below the median for England and Wales.

Bar chart of mean household income for 30 towns along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, from Standish at the top to Ince-in-Makerfield at the bottom, with most bars short of the England and Wales median line
Mean household income for the towns of 10,000 or more within 1 km of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, financial year ending 2023.

My reading, and it is only a reading, is that the canals tied towns to the industries of their age, coal, cotton and heavy goods, and those industries have gone. The towns kept their people. They did not keep their edge.

How I did this

Canal lines are OpenStreetMap waterway=canal ways, matched by name to the opening years in Wikipedia’s List of canals in the United Kingdom, with the 1929 Grand Union split back into its older canals and a few dates from Wikidata. Town populations come from the ranking tables in Wikipedia’s List of towns and cities in England by historical population, which list only the top 30 or 40 towns of each year and have no table for 1851. I placed each town with OS Open Names and matched it to its Census 2021 built-up area, with income from the ONS small area estimates. A canal town is within 2 km of a canal dated 1830 or earlier; the result holds at 1 km and with other definitions.

The samples are small and the dates are rough. Some canal towns count as “other” because their canal is undated or has been filled in, including Stockport, Bolton, Oldham, Derby and Bradford. Boundaries in 1801 and 2021 differ. Everything here is association, not cause.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

Tristan Hotham

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