Blog: £7m plan to restore canal is a fantastic idea
Well this is a turn-up for the books. A plan to spend millions of pounds which is being examined by council officials – and I whole heartedly approve. (I hope you were sitting down for that bit.)
to restore a 200-year-old section of the Shrewsbury and Newport Canal from the Buttermarket on towards Uffington, opening it up to narrowboats once more. What larks.
The idea has been kicking around for some considerable time but now it looks that it might, as last, have legs. Or whatever a narrowboat's equivalent of legs is. It probably doesn't have one, thinking about it.
An Englishman loves messing about on the river. Otherwise it wouldn't be a phrase. And messing about on the canal is just the same. Only with the added bonus of there being less chance of eventually ending up in France.
Shrewsbury and Newport Canals Trust has been working to re-open the canal since 2000, but now there are exciting looking artist's impressions of what it could look like. You don't spend time and money on those unless you're serious (even if you probably can just knock them up at lunchtime on an iPhone app these days).
Bernie Jones, the chairman of the trust, compares the plan to the regeneration of the Birmingham Canal and says it could create a cafe culture alongside the canal.
Have you been to Brum? Have you seen what they've done to the canal? It is, if you'll excuse my language, flipping marvellous.
Equally, the canalside at Chester springs to mind. All boutique hotels and eateries. So, well, nice.
Birmingham and Chester are the kinds of places tourism and business leaders in Shrewsbury are desperate to compete with, so you would hope that these sectors will throw their full weight behind the plan.
Not only will it make the town an even more attractive place to visit, money will also come in from those using the canal for boating holidays. They have to moor-up somewhere. And they have to get supplies. Ch-ching.
I first heard of plans to restore the canal while covering the ongoing saga of the Flax Mill regeneration some years ago (it may have even been around 2000. There or thereabouts). Well now there appears to be some real progress on the Flax Mill and it is hoped this scheme can tie in.
That seems sensible. Which is another reason to support it. There have been plenty of not-very-sensible-at-all decisions carried out in Shrewsbury recently (no, I wasn't going to mention the pedestrian refuge, actually. But since you brought it up . . .)
As something of a walker (yes, you read that correctly) I also love a stroll by a canal. So there's another one (other walkers, I mean. Not because I like it).
Judging by some comments I've seen already, it looks like the scheme also has the backing of the public in Shrewsbury.
So what's stopping us?
The small matter of a few million quid?
Pah . . . a drop in the canal.
Dave Burrows
