A late proposal for the Leeds & Liverpool

From the Archives: NarrowBoat, Winter 2025

Joseph Boughey

Joseph Boughey examines archives revealing a last bid to give the L&L a new freight role

New possibilities Regular carrying traffic on the Merseyside end of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal declined precipitously in the early 1960s, leaving only the coal traffic on the Leigh Branch to Wigan, and small-scale revivals. One of 1,799 British Waterways files deposited into the Waterways Archive at Ellesmere Port in the mid-1990s is CRT/BW/95/1101, which provides some insights into a possible role for the canal from Liverpool Docks. By 1965 the local coal traffic had ceased, leaving only small lighterage movements between the docks and canalside premises. These would soon stop. Nationally, concerns had been raised about highway traffic congestion following the Traffic in Towns report of 1963. For road freight, this especially applied around urban ports where streets had not been designed to serve large volumes of motor traffic. One possibility was to use water transport from dock areas to sites outside conurbations, where cargoes could more easily be transferred to roads. One…