A Llifetime at Farmers Bridge

Picturing the Past: NarrowBoat, Autumn 2026

Andy Tidy

Andy Tidy provides a then-and-now perspective of one of Birmingham’s most recognisable waterway landmarks

There is something profoundly compelling about archive photographs of familiar places, particularly when they can be compared with contemporary images taken from exactly the same spot. Sometimes it can be difficult to replicate old photographs, but when the subject is a location such as the 13-lock Farmers Bridge flight in Birmingham, the fixed alignment of the locks allows modern photographers to compose their images with remarkable accuracy. The locks themselves may have changed little over the decades, but the same cannot be said of their surroundings, which, for the most part, have been transformed beyond recognition. I recently came across a collection of nearly 1,000 black-and-white photographs held in CRT’s National Waterways Archive at Ellesmere Port. They were taken by a Mr H.E. Evans as he cycled around the Birmingham Canal Navigations between 1961 and ’63. These explorations took place when the fortunes of the BCN were probably at their lowest ebb. The last ca…