BCN: Black Country Crossing

Forsaking both the well-known BCN main line and the northernmost reaches of the Birmingham Canal Navigations, we take a middle route through the heart of the Black Country

- Martin Ludgate

To some boaters, the formerly industrial waterways of the Birmingham Canal Navigations (BCN) are at best a means to an end: a length of urban canal to be traversed to reach the more attractive rural cruising grounds on the far side. To others, the surviving 100 miles of what was the country’s most intensely industrial network have an attraction in their own right: these BCN enthusiasts will seek out every dead end, looking for signs of old wharves, basins and arms and the history that they reveal.

By and large, boaters in the first group will most likely take the BCN Main Line, covering the distance from Aldersley Junction near Wolverhampton to Gas Street Basin in Birmingham in the shortest distance and the least time. Those in the second group will like nothing better than to wander off to the far northern reaches, heading up the Wyrley & Essington to Anglesey Basin, Norton Canes and the Daw End Branch before returning south down the Rushall Canal to Birmingham.

But we’re going to take a third route through the system from west to east, possibly one cruised even less than those already mentioned – taking in the Walsall and Tame Valley canals, quiet routes whose surroundings were was once industrial heartland, but (at least in places) are getting greener with every year.

We begin at Aldersley Junction, where we turn off the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal to enter what is now the Main Line of the BCN, but was originally simply the Birmingham Canal.

Completed as early as 1772, this consisted of one route linking Birmingham to Wolverhampton and Aldersley Junction, and a second branching off to Wednesbury. The first of these, heavily rebuilt over the years (including whole new sections of straight canal to bypass the original windings) has come down to us in the form of today’s BCN Main Line.