CANALS, once the arteries of the Industrial Revolution, are to return to transporting goods in an effort to remove lorries from congested roads. British Waterways, which manages 2,000 miles of canals and rivers, has drawn up a plan to carry millions of tonnes of freight on the network.

Leisure craft have dominated canals since the Second World War and most of the recent projects to restore disused waterways have focused on tourism, but congestion and the rising cost of fuel have prompted a series of projects aimed at attracting freight back to canals.

Work will begin today to create a series of wharves on the Grand Union Canal in West London. The first, at Willesden Junction, will allow barges carrying waste to unload at a recycling plant, taking 37,000 lorry journeys off London’s streets.

In the heyday of the canal network, from 1760 to 1840, more than 30 million tonnes of goods were carried each year on 5,000 miles of waterways across Britain. In just two years, in the 1790s, 37 Acts for the construction of new canals were passed by Parliament.

Canals went into decline with the rise of the rail network in Victorian England, but it was the coming of the motorway in the 1960s that almost finished off the barge as a mode of transport. By last year the quantity of goods shifted by canal had dwindled to 1.6 million tonnes.

British Waterways plans to almost quadruple that figure, to 6 million tonnes, by 2010.

The increasing pressure on industry and households to recycle is helping to create a new market for canal-borne freight.

A spokesman for British Waterways said: “You are never going to want to transport bananas by canal, but waste is not time sensitive. Using such a green mode of transport also fits very well with the recycling industry, which is growing fast.”

With each household producing 1.5 tonnes of waste a year and half the population living within five miles of a canal or navigable river, British Waterways estimates that it could eventually carry 234 million tonnes of waste a year.

The River Lee Navigation in East London is to be used to carry municipal waste from Hackney to an energy-generating incinerator in Edmonton. British Waterways is also planning to revive the Bow Back Rivers, between Bow and Stratford in East London, to carry 6,000 tonnes of goods a day, saving 75,000 lorry journeys per year.

The cost of moving goods by canal is cheap — British Waterways charges only 1p per tonne for each kilometre travelled — but companies have to factor in the cost of delivering goods to the canal and taking them to their final destination, maybe two lorry journeys.

British Waterways believes that the solution is to build recycling plants and distribution centres next to canals.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Sarah Brown and the ladies who tweet
• Open letter to a hero's daughters, from the daughter of a murdered officer
• Transplant drug extends life in mice