A Brief History of the Canal to Buckingham

by Steve Miles

The Grand Junction Canal Company's branch navigation from Cosgrove to the market town of Buckingham in fact consisted of two distinct arms - distinct not only in their original conception by the planners of the Canal, but also in their acceptance by Parliament, and even in their physical construction.

The first was the Old Stratford Arm, a level cut of 1 mile 533 yards, applied for and authorised in the original Grand Junction act of 1793: This length was considered important enough for inclusion in the initial Bill because it offered the Canal a link with the old Roman road of Watling Street, at that time still a major highway, with all the traffic-generating potential which that suggests. The continuation to Buckingham, surveyed by Barnes in 1793, was included in the subsequent Bill passed by Parliament in March 1794, which also authorised the Aylesbury and Wendover arms.

In fact, the plans for the Old Stratford and Buckingham arms were changed after the acts were passed. Originally, the Grand Junction plans relied on lock flights and a river-level crossing to traverse the Great Ouse Valley at Wolverton, but the river was prone to serious flooding in the winter months, and after due consideration new plans including the embankments and aqueduct we are familiar with came into being, to avoid the obvious threat to traffic.

First plans for the Old Stratford cut had it leaving the main line at the river crossing, running along the valley floor to Watling Street, and then the Buckingham extension continuing to Passenham village, where it would have rejoined the river, which was to have been canalised to the Town. Due to the pronounced fall of the river over this distance, a number of locks would have been required. With the changes to the main line, a new junction was chosen immediately above Cosgrove Lock, and the line of the arms thence ran along the upper side of the valley, incidentally offering an easier navigation both to construct and to work, as now only two locks would be needed to raise the canal to its Buckingham terminus.

The main line was opened to traffic in August 1800 (see here for a contemporary account of the Opening Celebrations), albeit on the original plan, with the lock flights each side of the Great Ouse valley. Another indication of the perceived importance of the Old Stratford Arm comes from the fact that this was the next job Barnes' labour force tackled - the Arm, built to the same wide dimensions as the main line, was complete just six weeks later, before the end of September. Construction then continued towards Buckingham; the nine-and-a-half mile cut, with its two locks, numerous bridges and an aqueduct, built to the narrow 7ft dimension of other Grand Junction arms, was finished in a further eight months, in time for a ceremonial opening on May lst, 1801. The fact that the Marquis of Buckingham was a major shareholder in the Grand Junction company, and had in fact loaned all of the costs of construction of the arm, may have had some bearing on this almost unseemly haste! By contrast, the embankments and aqueduct on the main line had to wait until 1805 for their completion; even then, of course, problems with the aqueduct were not resolved until the opening of the Iron Trunk in 1811.

Water-borne transport had an immense impact on the area - coal, stone, bricks, manufactured goods, imported produce from London Docks were all more readily available, at much lower cost, than ever before; and local produce could be moved faster and more easily, whether it was foodstuffs to the local market, or the boat-loads of hay and straw that were exported to London to provide for the horse-drawn transport of the City. Within a few years, trade on the arm had reached 20,000 tons per annum, and was to remain at this sort of level for almost fifty years.

In 1850, the Bletchley to Banbury branch railway was opened, and soon began to draw trade away from the canal, although here as elsewhere the threat of competition kept the boats on their mettle, and trade continued, profitably, through the railway age. Of greater significance on the Buckingham Arm was the already-evident problem of silting, caused in part by the feeder, entering the channel from the fast-flowing river in the Town, quickly depositing its suspended silt in the slower-moving water of the canal. Further complication came from the fact that the final stretch of canal belonged not to the Canal Company, but to Buckingham Corporation, who seized upon it as an ideal disposal dump for the town's sewage, adding enormously to the silting problem!

By the 1880's, annual trade to the Town was down to around 2,500 tons of coal, and 500 tons of other goods. In 1890, the Grand Junction company finally lost patience, and took out an injunction to prevent the disposal of sewage by the Corporation into the canal. But by this time it was already too late; the damage had been done, the Buckingham end of the Arm was in poor repair, and the lost traffic could not be regained. Trade to and from the basin had ceased by the turn of the century - in 1904, Bradshaw's Directory listed the stretch from Maids Moreton Wharf as 'barely navigable'. In the early years of this century, 20-30 boats a year were still trading to Maids Moreton; roadstone was still being carried to Leckhampstead for the Rural District Council, and general trade continued to and from Deanshanger.

Once trade to Buckingham had ceased, the silt was allowed to build up without check; soon it was obstructing the flow from the feeder, and navigation became more and more difficult, especially above the locks. The level pound between Cosgrove and lock 1, Hyde Lane, began to draw its water from the main line. Boats became less and less frequent, and leakage resulting from a low level of maintenance began to be a problem, so much so that a major stoppage in 1919 saw the worst length, at Mount Mill Farm, relaid as a concrete trough by a method developed by Thomas Milner, the Grand Junction's area engineer.

The last recorded boat to travel the Arm was a single Fellows, Morton and Clayton Ltd. motor boat, carrying carboys of chemicals to Leckhampstead in 1932: by now the arm was so silted that the boat had to be hauled by a horse from Thornton Bridge. During the second World War, concerns about leakage led to the bulldozing of a 'temporary' dam under bridge 1 of the Old Stratford Arm in 1944; after the war, with no trade, real or potential, the dam remained in place, and the arms lay derelict.

In 1960, a survey carried out by engineers of the now nationalised administration saw no justification for reinstatement of the navigation, and recommended that the arms be allowed to remain disused. Under the British Transport Commission's powers, the Buckingham Arm was abandoned in 1964; the Old Stratford Arm was retained, although the A5 dual carriageway was built across it the early 1970's, and the basin at Old Stratford was sold in 1991. To this day, the length from Cosgrove to the A5 is owned by British Waterways, and is still legally a canal, despite its dry condition...

...And when the first stage of our plans come to fruition, hopefully within just a few years, it will again be navigable.

See "The Old Stratford Cut" more historical information