A Voyage Between Two Seas - Down the Air and Calder to Goole

Part four of a five part BBC series made in 1983 following the trade route from the Mersey to the North Sea. Poet Pete Morgan undertakes a voyage from the River Mersey in Liverpool, along the Leeds & Liverpool canal, down the Aire & Calder navigation, onwards down the Humber, finishing when he gets to the North sea. Now that the series is nearly 40 years old it is a vision of history, from when the Aire and Calder was still commercially active, coal fired power stations and water transport were still working and Liverpool docks hadn't been developed.

Video Channel

There are an array of fascinating archive videos featuring Britain’s inland waterways available on the internet and they offer an important dimension to our understanding of the inland waterway story. To help you access these videos we have assembled a searchable database of archive films with links to the originals. The database is searchable by waterway and by decade. Clicking on the image in the listing below will bring the associated video to the top for viewing.

Where there is no image available clicking on the link will take you to the website where the original is hosted for viewing there.

We welcome suggestions and recommendations of archive films not included here – please email them to editorial@wwonline.co.uk.

Search by waterway and decade