Barton Aqueduct Pocket Park

Here’s the Barton swing road bridge from Barton Aqueduct Pocket Park in Barton, Salford, and it’s open.

Or closed, I suppose, depending on whether you’re a big boat making your way along the Manchester Ship Canal, or a motorist or pedestrian inconvenienced by not being able to use it to get over the ship canal.

Whatever it was – open or closed – it was like this because of roadworks on one side or the other, and I thought I might as well take a pic or two.

The aqueduct/swing bridge that carries the Bridgewater Canal over Manchester Ship Canal.

The road bridge is just one bridge over the ship canal at this point; the other is the, probably more famous, bridge that carries the Bridgewater Canal over the ship canal, the aqueduct after which the park is named.

That’s also a swing bridge, and it was that that I was really hoping to find open when I went to the pocket park, because it would be pretty cool to see what’s effectively a massive tank of water ‘swing’ (they seal off the ends first, of course).

I’m not sure if this is something to do with making the bridge swing round or a crane used to lift the ends of the ‘tank’ into plsce before it moves.

Although perhaps my hopes were misplaced anyway – a local young man, in his 20s I’d say, also in the park said he’d seen the aqueduct bridge open (or closed, of course) only once in his life. My mate who moved a couple of miles away last year says she’s seen it open once too. Mind you, seeing as she’s worked locally for nearly a couple of decades, I suppose it is just possible that she and the young man saw it open at the same time. Whatever, I suppose it’s a sign of how much the traffic using the ship canal has changed over the years.

Which is kind of ironic, in a way, seeing as the swing aqueduct replaced a fixed, stone one that couldn’t cope with the traffic on the ship canal at the end of the 19th Century.

I happened to be in Worsley (thanks to my mate), which is why I went to the pocket park. I’m not sure it’s worth a special trip, although if you’re interested in history, and especially industrial history, that neck of the woods is pretty interesting.

The Bridgewater Canal, for example, was the first canal navigation independent of natural waterways, built ‘by’ the Duke of Bridgewater in the middle of the 18th Century to carry coal from his mines in Worsley to Manchester. He later extended it one way towards the port at Runcorn and the other to join the Leeds Liverpool canal at Leigh (and the rest of the canal network), so it’s now around 39 miles long.

The engineer, James Brindley, plotted its course so it was completely flat, and so needed no locks. Although that did mean he had to get the canal over the then-River Irwell, which he did via that original stone aqueduct, which was completed in 1761.

The first canal aqueduct in Britain, it was 600ft long, 36ft wide at top, with an 18ft wide waterway that was about four and a half feet deep. The waterway was ‘puddled’, or lined and sealed with mud; ‘puddling’ was also Brindley’s idea, too, and he used it along the rest of the canal.

: The wall from Brindley’s original stone aqueduct

: Masons’ marks

: I took this because it freaked me out a bit: the sunshine, the heat, the lush vegetation. I thought for a minute I was back in Angkor, Cambodia

: The bridge carrying the canal over Barton Lane

: Ooops! The other side of the bridge.

: Approach to the aqueduct from the Worsley side of the Ship Canal

: Close-up of the approach.

The aqueduct fulfilled its purpose for around 130 years, until the River Irwell was made into the ship canal, to carry vessels inland from Liverpool to Manchester. Brindley’s aqueduct, and a nearby road-bridge, didn’t offer enough clearance for the larger cargo ships, hence the swing versions.

And now the docks are “Salford Quays”, all fancy flats (sorry, ‘apartments’) and “Media City” TV and radio studios. Along with, to be fair, The Lowry theatre and arts centre and Imperial War Museum North.

And the swing bridges are more often static than ‘swinging’…

The Historic England listing for the current bridges here: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1356522

There’s more info here: http://www.est1761.org/heritage-stories/barton-bridges

Loads of weird and wonderful info on James Brindley (and an engraving of his aqueduct) can be found here: https://www.marplelocalhistorysociety.org.uk/society-meetings/meetings-2019-2020/465-21-october-2019-roy-murphy-james-brindley-the-first-canal-engineer.html

And here’s the pocket park: https://www.salford.gov.uk/bartonpocketpark