"Navigating Highland glens, rolling countryside, river valleys and city sprawl," "Britain's canals cut a sedate path through some of the country's finest scenery." "Canals were the transport arteries at the heart of a booming industrial age." "A network of locks, tunnels and aqueducts helped carry goods to every corner of the land and beyond," "transforming 19th-century Britain into an economic superpower." "Today, over 2,000 miles of restored canals offer a gateway into a different world." "For me, and many others, the towpaths alongside them offer the perfect way to explore this heritage on foot." "Welcome to Birmingham." "I never thought I'd say that at the beginning of a walk." "But ask any Brummie and they'll proudly tell you there are more canals here than in Venice." "Technically that's true, but I'm not here for gondolas or ice cream." "I'm here to discover why this city and its canal network was the epicentre of our industrial revolution." "Birmingham was known as "The city of 1,000 trades"." "By 1759, it was the heart of a manufacturing phenomenon." "At least 20,000 people were employed in the production of everything, from steam engines and buttons to toys and guns." "According to one industry leader of the time, this success was down to the "superactivity" of the people." "But this wasn't the only factor." "By the 1790s, "Canal Mania" was born." "These new transport superhighways crucially accelerated the delivery of raw materials and the distribution of goods." "I'm hoping that the rain is going to stop." "And it has." "My walk today is along the Worcester  Birmingham canal." "And, curiously, it starts here - a narrow gap, connecting it to the rest of the city's waterways." "The Worcester  Birmingham Canal was built to connect a city and the sea at Bristol." "It changed the fortunes not only of the Midlands but of the entire country." "So this is a tale of two cities and a journey from 18th-century industry to 21 st-century escapism." "The Worcester  Birmingham Canal was designed as a shortcut to the River Severn and the ports at Gloucester and Bristol." "Digging began in earnest in 1794." "Once finished, Birmingham would be destined to become "the Workshop of the World..." "My two-day walk follows the entire length of the 30-mile canal, starting in Birmingham and cutting through the beautiful Worcestershire countryside." "The towpath eventually takes me to another great city of the Midlands, Worcester, birthplace of the great British composer, Edward Elgar and home to the world famous Royal porcelain." "It's going to be a walk of contrasts along a route that was at the heart of the Golden Era of British industry." "I might have a damp start to my walk but I'm off to meet Graham Fisher- canal author, expert and a boy from the Black Country, who can hopefully shed some light on what makes this canal so special." "Hi, there, Graham." " Hello, Julia!" " Hello." "This is a particularly special canal." "It's got a rich history." "And it means quite a lot compared to other canals." "Just here, off Gas Street, you've got at least eight different canals, all with their own attributes and stories to tell." "But this one here, the Worcester  Birmingham, just seems to tell the lot." "Whatever you want is here - industrial archaeology, nature at its finest, somewhere to walk the dog..." "This is a significant canal in the Industrial Revolution, isn't it?" "It's hugely significant." "It provided a route from Birmingham down to a section of the Severn." "It also helped to access goods made in Birmingham outwards to Worcester and stuff from Worcester coming in." "In this area of Birmingham, the Black Country, if something wasn't made here, it wasn't made anywhere in the world." " It really was the heart." " Certainly." "Goods from here could be taken from here to Worcester, thence to the Severn, downstream to Gloucester, Bristol and the great ports beyond." "Good manufactured in this very spot could find their way anywhere in the world." "It's a bit of a wet day but what have I got to look forward to along this canal?" "A bit of a wet day?" "It's pouring down!" "That just adds to the magic of the waterways for me." "I love it at times like this." "Between here and the city environs, just a few miles away, you've got so much to see." "You've got tunnels coming up, you've got a very famous name of Cadbury's." " I understand you like your chocolate." " I love my chocolate!" "A special stop for you just there." "Chocolate crumb was brought up from the river, the Gloucester  Sharpness canal, up to be processed at the Bournville factory." "And then you suddenly burst out of the city environs and you are surrounded by a veritable cacophony of birds, nature, greenery." "It's absolutely splendid." "When you get to the top of Tardebigge Locks and you are looking down these winding locks, down over the valley towards the Severn, it will melt your heart." "Sold." "You've got me." " Bye, Graham!" " Bye-bye." "It's already clear that canal side development has played a huge part in rejuvenating the city." "Over £488 million has been invested since 2001 and new buildings and apartment blocks abound." "That is, until I get to Edgbaston, home not only to the famous cricket ground but also to Birmingham's posh." "From the centre of town, it doesn't take long to get to the place where the trees begin, as it's sometimes called." "It was the vision of the landowner Sir Henry Gough-Calthorpe in the 1700s to keep Edgbaston a rural oasis in the heart of an industrial city, free of factories and warehouses " "a very attractive proposition for the well-to-do of Birmingham." "Edgbaston became the fashionable place to live for the increasingly prosperous middle classes, who wanted to escape the stench, smoke and noise." "But in 1791, an Act of Parliament granted the Worcester 8." "Birmingham Canal Company the authority to cut a waterway through his estate." "Objections to the impact of the canal meant the project dragged on for 24 years, with a host of different engineers all putting their name to it." "They needed to placate the landowners, while ensuring that the water supply to the mills wasn't affected." "But Sir Henry had clout in parliament, so there were a few agreeable clauses in the bill:" "no towpaths, no warehouses, no wharves on the same side as a stately home." "And on top of that, the landed gentry could transport all of their own goods for free and were granted full fishing rights." "It's good being powerful, isn't it?" "But what it does mean for today's Birmingham is that it provides people with a lovely place to escape within the city limits." "Continuing south on my walk, I'm almost at the outskirts of Birmingham and approaching a station with a very familiar name..." "Bournville." "There it is." "The Cadbury factory - a great British institution." "Its position there suggests that, back in the day, it must have had some connection to the canal." "But more importantly, how can the producers bring me here, so close to a chocolate factory, and not let me go inside?" "It wasn't just the residents of Edgbaston who were keen to find a green enclave." "Cadbury's moved out here in the 1870s from grimy industrial Birmingham with the trailblazing vision of creating a workers' paradise." "Richard and George Cadbury spent their Sundays strolling the green fields to the south, trying to find a suitable spot next to the canal to escape the terrible slums of the inner city." "Bournville was the result - not only the base for their factory but the first planned community in the world, with shops, churches, schools, reading rooms and hospitals." "For 40 years, the factory enjoyed a full working relationship with the canal, bringing in raw materials like cocoa beans from as far away as Ghana and their famous chocolate being exported to the colonies up until the 1920s." "But even as the train arrived and the canal declined, it was still used on a minor domestic scale by the factory right into the 1960s." "And to make matters worse... when you sniff the air, I'm not lying... it smells of chocolate." "From sights to smells, it's the simple pleasures of this canal that I'm really starting to enjoy." " Hiya!" " Hi, there." " Where are you off to?" " London." " London?" " London." " Proper London, London?" " Yes." "How long's it going to take you?" "Between seven and ten days." "Why?" "Why are you doing that?" "To celebrate Roy's birthday, he's 65 on Monday." " Oh, fantastic!" "Happy birthday." " Thank you." "We wanted to do something different because we own a pub, anyway, so..." "So you didn't want to have a night in a pub, so you got a week on a boat instead." "Who does all the driving?" "I do and June does all the locks." " You've got the hard job, June." " Yeah." " What an adventure." " It is at our age." "We should be sitting and knitting or something." " No, that's boring." " Yeah." " Have a fantastic time." " Thank you very much." "As Birmingham finally fades into the distance, the canal disappears into a one-and-a-half-mile tunnel." "Unfortunately, there's no towpath, which means I'll have to go overground just like the boat horses used to." "Back in the day, donkeys were often favoured because they were small enough to hop on board." "No such luck for me." "On soft ground, a horse would only be able to pull a can weighing half a tonne, compared to a load of 50 tonnes on a canal." "A massive housing estate, built in the 1970s after Birmingham's inner slums were cleared, now stands at Hawkesley, in what used to be open farmland." "A mile on and I'm in rural Worcestershire." "And once on the other side of the tunnel, I'm in a very different scene." "The canal now nestles beneath a canopy of high trees surrounded by rolling green countryside." "After just over eight miles, my walk passes the quaint little village of Alvechurch." "This sleepy hollow is the birthplace of Godfrey Baseley, creator of The Archers, the longest-running radio broadcast anywhere in the world." "And it was the surrounding Worcestershire countryside that was supposed to have inspired his rural soap opera." "The towpath eases gently along for another six miles or so to the halfway point on my walk." "Here, it's well worth heading up onto the bridge for a charming view - a nice reward at the end of day one." "That beautiful 18th-century spire marks the key point of the walk." "This is the village of Tardebigge, where the author of a surprise bestseller moored up during the bleak years of World War ll." "Tom Rolt's 1944 book, Narrow Boat was the story of his travels with his wife along what remained of the decaying canals." "To his surprise, it was a resounding hit with both the public and the critics." "Not least, it seemed to appeal to national pride and the determination to preserve Britain's heritage." "At the end of the book, he writes..." ""if the canals are left to the mercies of economists and scientific planners, before many years are past, the last of them will become a weedy stagnant ditch and the bright boats will rot at the wharves, to live on only in old men's memories."" "A puzzled Tom Rolt was inundated with fan mail." "One letter that caught his attention was from another young author who shared his love for canals." "In it, he proposed the formation of a society to revive Britain's neglected canal network." "The young author was Robert Aickman, and it was when Roit invited him on board his boat Cressy, moored here at Tardebigge, that they decided to form an association with a mission to restore over 2,000 miles of canals across the UK." "And it looks like they ended up doing a pretty fine job, too." "This is where the two of them met and decided to revive the canal network." "They set up the Inland Waterways Association." "But that's not the only thing that makes this part of the canal special." "The village also gives its name to the longest flight of locks in the UK." "But I'm saving that for tomorrow." "At the start of day two, this dramatic two-mite flight of 30 locks ties ahead of me, lowering the canal 220 feet." "I'm starting at lock 58, and as I drop downhill, so do the numbers." "Descending the whole flight will take me to lock 29." "Lock number 1 is still another 15 miles away, the prize at the end of my walk, when I finally get to Worcester." "15 miles of canal and you might have noticed that this is actually the first lock, lock 58." "And active it is." " Hello!" " Hello!" " This is the last one." " It is, it is." " How l0ng's it taken you?" " Five hours." "Five hours." " Five long hours." " Mostly in the rain." "Yes!" "So we had to keep morale up, obviously, with hot drinks and food." "What have I got to look forward to, lots of nice stuff?" "Lots of lovely, lovely stuff." "It drops about 200 feet or so." "And just lots of good scenery, lovely scenery." "And boat people." "People on the canal." " Nice, friendly?" " Very friendly, very colourful." " How many times have you done this?" " First time." " So, big adventure?" " Yeah, would recommend." "Fantastic." "Good luck, then, ladies." "Nice to see you." "Bye." "At lock 57, you pass the old engine house, which used to help maintain water levels in the canal." "When it takes an average of 90,000 gallons of water every time the lock gates open, you realise why the canal engineers needed to stockpile water close by." "Tardebigge reservoir continues to keep this flight of locks in action, with feeder channels now directing water back into the canal." "Nice little diversion." "The terrain at Tardebigge presented a major geographical obstacle for the canal builders." "The route so far had travelled from Birmingham on a plateau, but here the canal needed to descend some 220 feet." "The initial solution incorporated 12 boatiifts that would move boats up and down this section." "Worried by the price tag of such an elaborate scheme, only one was built and the great canal engineer John Rennie was drafted in to assess the plan." "He concluded that it wouldn't survive the rough treatment it would receive from the boatmen and so the boatlift was abandoned in favour of the locks we see today." "That's a lovely sight, just seeing lock, after lock after lock." "Negotiating this flight of locks is considered by boaters to be a rite of passage." "It's definitely one for the check list." "The canals are packed with the technological wonders of their day." "But of all the surprising engineering feats, this has surely got to be one of the most impressive." "It is a long way to the bottom." "It feels like time for a cuppa and I'm hoping to meet lockkeeper Alan Troth and his wife Barbara at lock 18, where they live, right next to the water." " How long have you been here, Barbara?" " 20 years in November." " 20 years." " Yeah." "I bet you've seen just about every conceivable boat with every conceivable person on it." "We've even had a chap on the boat who'd boated for 30 years, stepped across the bottom gate, caught his foot on the collar, fell in and it killed him." " No?" " Yeah." "Oh, we see quite a few things here." "If you had to sort of describe life on this canal, how does it work through the seasons?" "What's it like in the winter?" "Quiet, apart from fishermen." " And for you, what's life like then?" " Boring." "I sit and do jigsaws all winter because there's nothing else to do." "You can't get out in the garden, you hardly see anybody unless the sun shines." "If the sun's shining, you get loads of walkers, push bikers, fishermen come and sit here freezing and they're like this, shivering." "I mean, I'm bumping into people all the time." "And they're all having a great time - families, lads on their boats, having a lad's weekend." "There seem to be people out here still enjoying the canals." "It is hard work, though." "Some of these top end paddles, they struggle to pick them up." "Getting through these locks isn't quite as easy as it looks." "Have a go, see if you can pick up." "Alan challenges me to have a go." "And with the gauntlet laid, how can I resist?" "Go on, you show Julia how to do it." "Here?" "On there?" "The other side..." "like this?" "Right, which way?" "That way or down?" "It's hard work just trying to do this once, never mind the 58 times that boaters face on this canal." "It's bloody hard work." "Yes, it's hard." "It's extraordinary to think this lovely little cottage, dating back to 1850, has been home to generations of lockkeepers like Alan and Barbara." "It's been part of the heyday of the canal, when goods like chocolate crumb and coal were carried past its front door." "Today, the scene hasn't changed all that much." "Traffic continues and at least 3,000 boats chug by each year." "But these narrow boats are carrying passengers enjoying holidays rather than goods." "I started this walk in the rain and I'll finish this walk in the rain." "A little bit of H2O doesn't stop the Bradbury." "My walk's now drawing to a close and as I arrive on the edge of Worcester, home not only to Elgar but also Worcester sauce, the weather begins to clear for the final home strait." "Apart from the canal, very little is left of Worcestefls manufacturing past." "Gone are the big factories and warehouses, which made use of the canal and its link to the nearby River Severn." "The Worcester Porcelain Museum is one of the few remaining clues that there was ever a formidable industry here." "I'm going to meet its curator, Wendy Cook." "Hello, Wendy." "Even before the canal, porcelain for Worcester was such a huge industry." "Yes, very much so." "There were four factories operating then." "On this site here, they were working by the mid-1780s to produce fantastic porcelain for the best customers." "And it was going all over the world?" "Absolutely everywhere, yes..." "America, India, China, believe it or not." " It was enormous!" " Yes." "And this was at a time when industry generally was in its infancy and there were very few actual factories." "Before the canal, how did this huge industry get everything it needed?" "It needed a lot of materials." "Mainly up the River Severn, which isn't actually very far away." " It's what, half a mile, or so?" " Half a mile at the most." "Yet this stretch of water made such a big difference." "Because the raw materials and the finished products were just so difficult to manoeuvre and so difficult to transport backwards and forwards, so breakable, so heavy." "The canal allowed the industry to expand and to produce very much more porcelain." "This is it, this is the scene of all of that activity, or as it was." "And now parts of it are derelict and parts are turned into what look like des-res apartments." "Yes." "They are redeveloping the factory site, which altogether was about 15 acres, and here there were four large bottle kilns, so it was a big employer in the city." "But a factory like this employed over 1,000 people." "That just doesn't happen any more." " It doesn't make financial sense." " No." "It is a shame." "It's not hard to see how the final half-mile stretch of my walk would have transformed business in Worcester." "Instead of relying on a mud track and a horse to transport precious loads of delicate pottery, it was this little bit of canal that swiftly linked to the Severn and the world beyond and was used commercially right up until the 1960s." "It's been quite a journey for me too, from landlocked Birmingham high up on a plateau, down to sea level and my final goal, the first lock of the canal." "And this is where my waterway joins an even bigger one... the River Severn." "And there it is... lock number one." "And the evidence:" ""Birmingham 30 miles, 58 locks."" "Yes!" "Lock number one finally opened its gates in December 1815, to cannon fire and music, as a hopeful and expectant crowd cheered the first passage of boats." "Within two weeks, the exchange of cargo was in full flow between the canal and river - everything from china clay to cocoa beans." "The Worcester  Birmingham canal embodies the Industrial Revolution." "Without canals, manufacturing and industry couldn't have grown the way that it did." "Ironically, today, these are an escape from modern-day life." "People live on them, walk alongside them, cycle alongside them." "They fit into the countryside like any river or stream, and in towns and cities, they're a tranquil haven." "Bet the canal builders didn't expect that."