Stourbridge Canal
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The Stourbridge Canal links the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal (at Stourton Junction) with the town of Stourbridge. A flight of sixteen locks takes a branch up the hill towards Pensnett Chase, where there were collieries. This divides one branch leading to the Fens and the other to Black Delph. This (now the Delph) is a flight of originally nine (now only eight) locks to the start of the Dudley Canal, which leads up by another flight of locks to the Dudley Tunnel. The two canals were originally proposed as a single canal in 1775, but were separately authorised in 1776. The engineer was Thomas Dadford. The Canal was largely complete in 1779. The canal remained profitable until the eve of the Second World War. A branch railway line from Stourbridge Junction station through Stourbridge Town station was built in the 1850s, leading to an interchange basin on the canal, and this aided its continued use.
A separate company built the Stourbridge Extension Canal to Shut End (in Kingswinford) thus opening up another part of the coalfield to development, but this passed into the hands of a railway company in 1860 and became completely disused after the Second World War.
The canal forms part of the Stourport Ring, which is one of the popular cruising rings for leisure boating.
[edit] Further reading
- C. Hadfield, Canals of the West Midlands (1969), 73-5 100-6 264-6.
- Birmingham Canal Navigations by Geo Projects (2004). Large detailed map of all the Black Country canals, as they currently exist.
