Stretching from the heart of the Potteries out into the hilly, wooded part of north east Staffordshire bisected by the River Churnet, lying between Leek and Uttoxeter, known as the “Staffordshire Rhineland”, the Caldon Canal is a waterways system as much singular channel.
Opened in 1779, the Caldon Canal was constructed as a means of connecting the textile manufacturing centre at Leek with the Midland’s rapidly expanding inland waterways network, and providing a route for the transport of southern Peak District limestone to the industrial centres of North West and western Midlands. In this regard the Caldon Canal was not unlike the later Peak Forest and Cromford Canals built during the 1790s.
Like many of the comparatively early canals constructed to principals pioneered by James Brindley (a Derbyshireman who lived much of his adult life in Leek, by chance) the Caldon Canal was a contour canal (though there are a few locks here and there along its course). This means that it meanders across the landscape following the natural lie of the land. Though the regularity and predictability of water as a surface for conveying goods was still a significant improvement upon the road network and packhorse routes that provided the main alternative form of transport in the mid-18th Century making contour canals an attractive prospect to investors and companies looking to move raw materials and finished products alike.
Having initially served two branches, one to Leek, the other to Froghall, partly reached by a section of the River Churnet rendered navigable, the canal was extended to Uttoxeter in the 1790s. Froghall was where tramways and inclined railways terminated which served the limestone quarries at Caldon from which the canal gets its name. In 1797 there was a draft private bill presented to Parliament for the canal to be extended north past Leek, to snake across a slither of the peak District, to Marple in what today is south western Greater Manchester. However, the construction of the Peak Forest Canal to Bugsworth and then the formation of the Cromford and High Peak Railway across the White Peak, put paid to this ambition.
The extension south to Uttoxeter proved fairly short lived. Sometimes referred to as the Uttoxeter Canal, but essentially an integral part of the Caldon Canal network, the waterway parallel the River Churnet for much of its course, and serving a largely remote and agricultural area, was never commercially successful. In 1849 it was purchased along with the rest of the Caldon Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal by the North Staffordshire Railway Company.
It was the North Staffordshire Railway Company’s ambition to build a route from London and the southern Midlands via the Churnet Valley to North West England which would rival the West Coast Mainline. This never came to pass, and besides supporting some growth of extractive industries and manufacturing along its course, their railway’s main achievement was encouraging the creation of the Alton Towers resort which remains one of the UK’s largest theme parks to this day.
To build their line the North Staffordshire Railway Company repurposed the course of the old southern stretch of the Caldon Canal from Uttoxeter. Nowadays this stretch of railway is itself long gone, replaced by a multi-use path for walkers, cyclists and equestrians. However, remarkably a lot of the canal’s infrastructure, despite having been abandoned for the best part of two hundred years, including the cut itself in some places, is remarkably well preserved.
North of Froghall, in common with the Peak Forest which remained a key route for transporting limestone from the southern Peak District to industrial users and builders in North West England, the Caldon Canal remained an important means of bulk carrying goods into the 20th Century. This said, as freight increasingly switched the other means and patterns of raw material use changed, by the post Second World War period it was increasingly derelict. The Caldon Canal never formally closed but by the 1960s its industrial use had largely ceased and it was near impassable along large stretches.
In common with the rest of the canal network, at the point of its obsolescence, interest in the Caldon Canal increased, and work to restore it to navigable condition began. This led to restoration of most of the Froghall branch by 1974, with work to restore the salvageable bulk of the Leek branch beginning in 1977. It was not possible to restore Leek’s former canal basin because it had been filled in for road widening in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2003 Froghall’s Wharf was restored and reopened for canal boaters to moor there, completing the restoration, unless at some point the campaign for restoring the route as far as Uttoxeter suddenly gets serious momentum and resources behind it.
Interestingly, the restoration of the Caldon Canal in the 1970s did see it regaining some limited industrial use. Johnson Brothers, then a china maker based in Milton on the north eastern edge of the Stoke conurbation, decided to begin shipping completed orders for packaging in Hanley along the Caldon Canal. They found that transshipment by water significantly reduced breakage versus carriage by road, and was fifty percent cheaper, so commissioned three new barges between 1967 and 1978, which operated successfully until 1990. One of the last regular commercial narrowboat uses, to date, in the UK.