Canalside

This is walking guide to the canal. For a history of the canal see Canal and Boatyard.

Boughton and the Steam Mill
Chemistry Lock was built c1775 by Samuel Weston for the Chester Canal Company and named after the former chemical factory which stood nearby. Across from the towpath the lock cottage is listed and dates from around 1800. The sluiceway of Chemistry Lock, runs in a circular-section culvert under the cottage and the detached privy, across the small yard. The privy, now conventionally drained, was designed to discharge into the sluiceway beneath, as if a monastic "rere-dorter". Samuel Weston was appointed engineer on the Chester Canal in 1772 after previous experience as a surveyor and canal contractor. He only stayed with the Chester Canal Company for a few years before moving on to canal work in the south of England.

Heading towards Chester there are some small terraced canalside cottages on the opposite bank which sit remarkably low on the waterline. Canal boatmen's families originally lived ashore, but in the 1830s (as canals started to suffer competition from the burgeoning railway system), families (especially those of independent single boat owner/skippers) began to live on board, partly because they could no longer afford rents, partly to provide extra hands to work the boats harder, faster and further and partly to keep families together.

A Canalside Gallery
On the towpath side the 1853 Water-Tower and attached beam-engine house of the waterworks at Boughton looms overhead. It was designed by F. L. Bateman, a noted water supply engineer and then consultant engineer to the Chester Waterwork Company. Springs at Boughton have provided Chester's Water Supply since the founding of Roman Chester and the path of the watercourse which the springs fed, in part known as Flookersbrook once defined the northern border of Chester. The water tower with attached engine house and boiler house forms the most prominent component of the former Tower Works, a river abstraction and water treatment works built for the Chester Waterworks Company in 1851-3, powered by a Cornish beam engine manufactured at Adam Woodward's Queens Foundry, Manchester. The site incorporated 3 sand filters and a brick-vaulted reservoir. The water tower was heightened from 70 to 84 feet in 1884 by jacking up the tank. In 1913, a diesel engine house was added to the complex. Other additions included a Davey horizontal steam engine, site offices and laboratory.



Hoole Lane Lock number 40 (built c.1775 by Samuel Weston) is next to the former Canal Church and Anglican Mission Chapel built in an "Arts and Crafts" style and now converted to residential use. After Hoole Lane bridge the canal is flanked by a modern housing development (Wharton Court) which echos the architecture of the warehouses which once lined this section of canal. The wooden sculpture "Waves of Wood" can be seen over the hedges. Waitrose's £13m store has a towpath frontage and was opened in November 2014: the development also included a new footbridge over the Shropshire Union Canal.

Opposite the towpath the landscape is dominated by the 168 foot "shot-tower" of the Leadworks, and on the towpath side by the "Steam Mill". William Watts of Bristol (originally listed in his tax returns as a plumber) took out a patent (number 1347, filed 10th December 1782, granted on March 28th, 1783) for his new technique for making lead shot, a process:




 * "for making smallshot perfectly globular in form and without dimples, notches and imperfections which other shot hereto manufactured usually have on their surface".

According to a legend (of which there are many versions), William Watts, while watching the rain fall, possibly in a dream, noticed that the raindrops formed perfect spheres as they fell. Watt's patented technique, was to allow molten lead, to which the deadly poison arsenic had been added, to be poured from the top of a tower, passing through a griddle to separate it into pellets before landing in a wooden vat of water below. During the fall, the pellets became spherical, and the various sizes obtained could be graded using sieves. Whatever, the truth, Watts' shot was very regular and smooth, unlike the lead shot produced by a moulding process, which had a ridge where the mould parted. This led King George II to remark of it:


 * "I wish all the men in my army were so regular like this shot"

The prominently marked "Steam Mill" beside the Canal dates from 1834 and was built partly over and partly alongside the original mill, which was the first steam-driven commercial flour mill using Boulton and Watt’s rotative engine in 1786 and predates the often-quoted Albion Flour Mills in London by three months - while work at the Albion Mill had started earlier, the Chester engine was the first to be completed. The Albion Mill in London was later gutted by fire, but the shell of the building was the inspiration for William Blake‘s "dark satanic mills". The interior of the Chester mill was notable for a blown-air seed-transport system upward, and a gravity system downward, removed on conversion of warehouse to offices.

Often missed are the Mill Offices in cobbled Steam Mill Street, a very short distance from the canal. This baroque 1897 building has a central clock in an ornate stone surround (dated 1897). The third part of the mill complex is the surviving part of the team original Steam Mill from c1785 whose boilerhouse and engine house have since been demolished. The middle wing facing Steam Mill Street stands in the position of the Steam Mill shown on Weston's map of Chester dated 1789 (engraved by Hunter) and incorporates what may be original cast-iron columns and beams; the 4-storey north wing facing the Chester Canal is probably early C19; the external features of the middle and south wings are probably 1840s. The square internal chimney below roof level survives at the junction of the middle and south wings.

This stretch of the canal is often home to several pairs of swans, who build their chaotic nests on the banks, as well as a multitude of ducks who will head towards anyone loitering on the canal bank in the hope of a slice of bread.

Harkers Arms to Cow Lane Bridge


The Old Harkers Arms was a Victorian warehouse before it was converted into a pub in the 1990's. It takes its name from the fact at one time it had been a canal-boat chandlers run by a Mr Harker. The adjacent City Road bridge (1863) has ironwork which was produced at the Egerton Iron and Brass Foundry, which was operated by James Mowle & Co. in 1871 and Mowle and Meacock by 1892. The foundry was located between Crewe Street and Albert Street, but had been demolished by 1910 when Egerton Street school was built on the site. Mowle and Co appear to have partly specialised in lead-manufacturing equipment (they were quite close to the Leadworks) as in 1880 they provided a horizontal single-cylinder steam engine driving a lead rolling mill at Sheldon, Bush and Patent Shot Co, Bristol.

A (very) small park by the canal close to the former site was opened in May 2006. The park contains a sculpture in stainless steel and blue glass which commemorates Chester's lead industry; 'Spheres of Reflection' by Edd Snell was inspired by lead drops impacting on the surface of water.

"Union Bridge" was construced by Thomas Lunt (1770-1851), born in Tattenhall, who was a Quaker, and developer of Chester in the early 19th Century. Although the land between the south bank of the canal and the gardens to the north of Foregate Street was still fields in the 1770s, development started there before 1800. Queen Street was the first to be built up, by John Chamberlaine and Roger Rogerson after 1778, but the earliest planned development was Bold Square, built c. 1814 by Thomas Lunt, a foundry owner and builder, and comprising two terraces of small houses facing each other across a strip of garden. Lunt erected Union Bridge across the canal at his own expense and on the north bank built much of Egerton Street (c. 1820), which included a terrace on the west side and five pairs of slightly larger semidetached houses on the east. South of the bridge, Seller Street was developed in 1818-19 by the brewery owner Alderman William Seller. Lunt build both the Commercial Hall and the Union Hall, trading premises on either side of Foregate Street. Lunt also turns up with some practical suggestions in the "Mechanics Magazine" of 1835 (where he suggests the "firewall" for steam vessels):


 * Steam boat Explosions - Mr Thomas Lunt of Chester suggests that the danger arising from explosions on board of steam vessels might be very materially diminished by the formation of a permanent iron partition between the engine house and the passengers cabins. The hint seems worthy of consideration - Liverpool Mercury August 21 1835

Further steam mills along this stretch of canal included the Milton Street (Cestrian) Mill, built in the 1850's - now the "Mill Hotel". For many years the Mill Hotel has run a floating restaurant on a converted barge.

Queen Street does not appear on the Lavaux Map of 1745, but does appear on Mutlow_and_StockdaIes_Map of 1795. The evidence points to Queen Street having been constructed fairly rapidly around 1777, with much development by two individuals in particular: John Chamberlaine and Roger Rogerson. The development of the street was connected with the development of the canal which was announced in 1771 and of which the first section was opened in 1775. The undeveloped land upon which the street stands was in part the old parade ground of Roman Chester and later the "Jousting Croft" and an area for archery practice. Fletcher, writing in 1791 says of it:


 * "Queen street has been built within these few years its situation is pleasant and airy in it is a large well-built chapel - the place of worship of a sect of Independents, also a reputable academy for the education of youth, kept by Mrs Sellers."

Queen Street was built at the time of a hope of economic recovery in Chester which was not to happen. Between 1762 and 1840 key elements of Chester's traditional economy withered and finally died, and the city struggled to find new roles. Previously important manufacturing trades vanished and were replaced only in part by new industries. From the 1770s city development was especially concentrated north of Foregate Street, beginning with Queen Street and expanding later to include Bold Square and Seller and Egerton Streets before 1820. The port declined so drastically that by 1840 Chester's wharves were of little importance, and the city also suffered problems with its road and canal traffic. It was only the coming of the railways and the building of Chester Station at the end of this period that boom returned (see: Industrial Revolution). Queen Street used to extend northwards fron Foregate Street through to the canal but was severed by the construction of a service-yard during the Tesco development. Queen Street played a significant part in the Georgian and Victorian development of religion in Chester. The only remnants of which are the surviving facades of the Independent Chapel and its associated Lecture Hall. Both the Independent Chapal and the Catholic St Werburgh's had their own graveyards, now lost under modern development.

The huge and complex brick building opposite the towpath was originally Chester’s first 1997-seat "super cinema", the Gaumont Palace, Brook Street, which opened on the 2nd March 1931. The cinema finally closed on the 9th December 1961 and is now a "Mecca" Bingo Club. On the towpath side, John McGaheys "balloon" view of Chester from 1855 shows a large crane. The king-post of this crane is still visible today just beore Cow Lane bridge (Nr 123E). There is a winding hole by Cow Lane Bridge. Cow Lane gets its name from the nearby cattle market which was located at "Gorse-stacks". For centuries, livestock were driven in from the surrounding countryside to be sold here. The cattle market remained an active and vibrant part of the Newtown area until it was demolished to make way for the Inner Ring Road in the 1960s. From the latter half of the century the Gorse Stacks area has changed significantly: major land-uses have disappeared, radial routes have been bisected and degraded by the inner ring road and the fine-grain street pattern has been replaced by large floorplate uses and open sites. Fortunately the canal towpath is shielded from most views of this modern "improvement".

Cow Lane Bridge to Northgate
The length of SS Great Eastern was marked out on the City Walls by William Haswell, a master mason, commissioned by a Mr Musgrave, who owned a wood-yard next to Cow Lane Bridge - possibly the one shown in McGahey's "balloon" view. The 692 feet is the distance from the marking to the Phoenix Tower, now visible ahead. That is quite a large ship, about twice as long as the Cathedral (which you can also see from this point) and over five time the height of the Cathedral tower. SS Great Eastern was an iron sailing steam ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by J. Scott Russell & Co. at Millwall on the River Thames, London. She was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers from England to Australia without refuelling. Brunel knew her affectionately as the "Great Babe". He died in 1859 shortly after her ill-fated maiden voyage, during which she was damaged by an explosion. After repairs, she plied for several years as a passenger liner between Britain and North America before being converted to a cable-laying ship and laying the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866. Finishing her life as a floating music hall and advertising hoarding (for the famous department store Lewis's) in Liverpool, she was broken up in 1889. Her length of 692 feet (211 m) was only surpassed in 1899 by the 705-foot (215 m) 17,274-gross-ton RMS Oceanic, ten years after the Great Eastern had been scrapped.

The "Phoenix Tower" stands almost on the site of a corner tower of the original layout of Roman Chester. Also known as: "King Charles' Tower", this north-east corner tower was probably built in the 13th Century origin, was altered in 1613, damaged 1644-6 during the Civil War, largely rebuilt 1658 and during the 18th Century, and repaired thereafter. The inscription on this tower reads:


 * 'KING CHARLES STOOD ON THIS TOWER SEPT 24th 1645 AND SAW HIS ARMY DEFEATED ON ROWTON MOOR'

So, can you see Rowton Moor from here? - hardly at all. The site of the "Battle of Rowton Moor" is over 2.5 miles away. What Charles was probably watching was the confused later stages of the battle when retreating Royalist forces were attempting to get back into Chester. There the retreating Royalist cavalry choked up the streets, allowing the Parliamentarian musketeers to fire into the confused mass of horsemen and leading to a rout.



After the Phoenix Tower it becomes plain that the canal is entering a deep cutting. Looking at the Braun and Hogenberg map (from 1581), we see something extending along the north wall of the city and down the east wall towards the Eastgate. Is this a road or possibly a ditch? Nowadays the canal, sitting in its rather deep cutting, follows the line of whatever this is along the north wall. There was a Roman ditch (fosse) before the wall but the depth of the cutting along the north wall seems excessive. However Simpson's "Walls of Chester" does seem to suggest that very little extra work was needed for the construction of the canal cutting:


 * "The contractor for the canal when making his excavations found that he was exactly on the line of the old Roman fosse, and that, instead of excavating solid rock, he had only to clear out the accumulated earth and rubbish: by this economy he was enabled to make a considerable fortune."

The above version suggests that hardly any actual rock needed to be cut. However, maybe it is just an "urban legend".

The tow-path hereabouts hugs the steep cliff below the City Walls. As it turns around the corner below the tower it is possible to see some some rope groves worn in the rock from the towing lines of boats. On the far side of the canal the slope is slightly less severe. Chester first established a workhouse in 1575 when a building just outside the Northgate "near the quarry in the Gorse Stacks" was converted for this purpose. The city records for 1575 mention the "House of Correction":




 * "This year there was a collection made in the city and of some worshipful in the county for a stock to set the poor on work and a house of correction built under the city wall near unto the Northgate which house was removed out of the corn market and was first placed there by Mr Webster for the butchers of the city."

Hemingway writes of the 1787 visit of the prison reformer John Howard to Northgate Gaol and the "House of Correction". In a watercolour by Moses Giffiths (1747-1819), the "House of Correction" is placed on the northern bank of the canal and must have been a damp and gloomy place. It included workrooms on two storeys. In its courtyard a narrow space in the face of the quarry was used in the 17th century to confine refractory youths, and during the Interregnum, Quakers, for a few hours in a tortured position where they could neither stand, sit, kneel, or lie. It was known, euphemistically, as "Little Ease". In the 1770s a workshop and two 'dungeons' were added. It was closed in 1808 and was briefly a school which was sold in 1817 to Joseph Fletcher, who converted the buildings into dwellings. Nothing remains today and the site is occupied by an electricity sub-station.

The cutting in which the canal runs reaches its deepest beneath the Northgate. The new Northgate was built in place of the former medieval gatehouse in 1810 by County architect Thomas Harrison for the City Council. There appears to have been a bridge of some sort here since the middle-ages - the City Treasurer's accounts for 1569 contain an entry which reads: "for making the north-gate bridge new, great joists, thick planks £4/3s/2p". The present bridge dates from around c1790 and its construction may have been supervised by Thomas Telford.

Northgate to the basin
A little beyond canal bridge at Northgate is a narrow stone arch which spans the chasm containing the canal. It is best seen from the bridge crossing the canal outside the Northgate or from the tow-path below. This is a flimsy-looking structure with no railings, and there is no means of accessing it at either end. The bridge cost £20 ($30) to build in 1793, and was designed by Joeseph Turner. It originally went from the Prison to a nearby chapel (in St John's Hospital) and had iron railings to prevent the prisoners from escaping. During WWII the metal railings were removed to be melted down (like many others) as a source of metal. It is described by Ronald Leigh in his memories recorded at the The Museum of Policing in Cheshire as follows:




 * Prisons unfortunately always seem to be necessary in any form of communal life and Chester seems to be no exception. No doubt the Romans had one but this is no longer apparent. However the site at the one at the Northgate is still on record. It forms part of the actual Northgate and the dungeons were in the sandstone rock of its foundations. The place of execution was also in the jail itself and prisoners before their execution were taken outside the walls to the church of Little St. John, which stood on or near the present site of the Blue Coat building. It was found that whilst taking this last walk, friends of such prisoners frequently staged attempts to free them. In order to foil such attempts by these footpads thieves and felons, the authorities in 1793 built the small bridge which can still be seen, less its protecting railway between the City walls in the west side of Northgate over the moat/canal to the Blue Coat school.

The Bridge of Sighs is bridge number 123H

The sandstone here is typical of this part of the River Dee Geology and shows signs of "cross-bedding". The Chester basin rock system is part of the "Sherwood Sandstone Group" which extends from Devon northwards as far as Armagh in Ireland and Gretna, Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. This "New Red Sandstone" was deposited as a result of the erosion of the Variscan mountains in what is now France. The Chester Pebble Beds Formation are part of this series and are river-formed sandstones with some conglomerates and siltstones of early Triassic age. One of the internationally recognised "reference sections" for these strata is the railway cutting nearby at Northgate stadium, but this same type of rock can be seen in several places around Chester, including here alongside the canal. The formation extends from the south Devon coast northwards, up to the Cumbrian coast on the west side of England, and to the Doncaster area on the east side.



The flight of the three Northgate Locks then descends beneath the railway and ring-road bridges as the cutting in which the canal runs becomes less deep. Nortgate Lock Keepers Cottage dates from c1790 and is believed, along with the locks, to have been designed by Thomas Telford. When constructed, the lock chambers were the largest in Britain, dropping boats down 33 feet. "Staircase locks" with two ajoining locks are quite common, although there are less than 20 in Britain with three or more locks and the Northgate Locks were among the first of these to be built. The railway from this point heads off on what should have been the course of the Ellesmere canal down to Shrewsbury had not Telford virtually bankrupted the company building his enormous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. The compromise solution was the use the at that time quite ruinous Chester Canal to link the sourthern and nothersn sections of the Ellesmere canal rather than build the final Ruabon-Wrexham-Chester section of the Ellesmere canal. It isn't clear how Telford proposed to cross the River Dee with the original route of the Ellesmere canal: when the Grosvenor Bridge was built in 1827-33 it required the worlds largest single masonry arch so that ships could pass beneath. Perhaps Telford would simply have boats sail between a pair of tidal basins on each side of the river.

Along the City Walls above the canal are Morgan's Mount and the Goblin Tower called in Henry VIII's reign, Dille's Tower and now generally known by the name of Pemberton's Parlour. The road bridge just past Morgans Mount marks the corner of the walls of Roman Chester, and from here on the walls are the extension constructed by Æthelflæd "Lady of the Mercians" (d. 12 June 918). She was the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great, king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, and his queen, Ealhswith. Æthelflæd was born at the height of the Viking invasions of England. Her father married her to Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians. After his death in 911, she ruled, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to her as the Myrcna hlæfdige, "Lady of the Mercians".

The corner tower of Æthelflæd's walls is Bonewaldesthorne's Tower (believed to be named after a Saxon) from which a spur wall leads to the Watertower] - so called because it once stood in the [[River Dee. Near the base of the Watertower can be found what is probably the Gloverstone worth a diversion to look at if you are only passing-by infrequently. It may be of the general class referred to as "Bluestone" (middle Ordovician ("speckled") dolerite - about 460 million years old - twice the age of the local red sandstone). It is not of the local rock type and therefore possibly a "glacial erratic" carried here during the ice ages and dropped into the local boulder clay (this rock type occurs in North Wales), although there has been no real geological examination of the stone to determine whether it is a local erratic or must have been brought from elsewhere by man (there no clear flow of glacial ice from North Wales which could have brought the stone to Chester).

The Branch to the Dee
Opposite the Water Tower, where a newish development of flats can now be found, the canal tow path was made in part of the gravestones of those who had lived and died on the water. These stones and any stories they could have told are now gone.

Basin and Boatyard
Taylor’s Boatyard at Tower Wharf was for many years run by David Jones, (67 in 2009), who repaired craft there for 35 years, but is now semi-retired. Parts of the yard date from the 1840s, and it is said to be “possibly the best surviving example” of an historic boat-building yard. In its commercial heyday, the boatyard employed more than 200 people, servicing the huge fleet of canal company working vessels. It comprises a workshop, former saw mill building, former blacksmith’s workshop, covered slipway and dry dock.

The yard has been known as Taylor’s Boatyard since it was leased by Joseph Harry Taylor in 1921 when the Shropshire Union Railway & Canal Company ceased carrying. Prior to 1921, Taylors had a yard on the Dee Basin alongside South View Road. The Dee Basin Slipways were established by Joseph Harry Taylor about 1913. Initially, Taylors operated the Graving Dock, and one of the 90 ft bays - the other half was operated by a Mr Horne, Canal Carrier of Cambrian Road. They also worked out of what was known as "Dandy's Shed". Dandy's Shed was removed when the North Basin was excavated. The Taylor family owned and ran the yard until 1972. Bithells Boats then took over the yard for two years before David Jones leased the proprty in 1974. In 2005 there was disappointment over the failure of a Lottery bid which would have restored the yard. It had been supported by waterway enthusiasts including Mr Taylor’s grandson Geoff Taylor, who lives in nearby Cambrian View.

The Junction Facilities
At the side of the basin is a building which appears to have a roof but no walls. This is actually a covered dry-dock for narrow-boats and can accommodate two boats at once, allowing the hulls of the boats to be maintained. The dry dock at Tower Wharf (known as Graving Dock) is believed to date from 1798, potentially making it the oldest surviving example of its kind on the canal system.

Next to the Graving Dock is a "Roving Bridge". This allows the horses drawing a barge to cross from one side of the river to the other where the tow-path changes sides, as it does here. The clever design of the bridge allows this to happen without disconnecting the tow rope or tangling it. The bridge bears a memorial to L. T. C. Rolt who was a prolific English writer and the biographer of major civil engineering figures including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and as an enthusiast for both vintage cars and heritage railways. He was born in Chester to a line of Rolts "dedicated to hunting and procreation".

Telfords Warehouse was originally conceived by the famous industrial engineer Thomas Telford in the 1790’s, the Warehouse stands as a magnificent example of Georgian architecture and as a reminder of the once thriving port of Chester. The building was constructed partly over the canal to allow boats to be located and unloaded from the full height of the loading bay within the building. The grade 2 listed building from 1802 was originally converted to a public house in the 1980′s by local architect James Brotherhood.

In 2000, Telford’s was forced to close due to a major fire which destroyed some of the building’s internal features and took nearly a year to restore.