Talk reflects on Bingley locks and canal connections to slave trade

Talk reflects on Bingley locks and canal connections to slave trade

How Bingley's famous Five Rise Locks helped to link Yorkshire to the rest of the world was the subject of a thought-provoking talk by the University of Huddersfield's Professor Jodie Matthews to help commemorate the 250th anniversary of the famous feat of engineering.

Professor Matthews has researched and written extensively on how literature about Britain's canals gives depth and feeling to our understanding of how the waterways linked inland Britain to its Empire, and how their connections to the transatlantic slave trade still resonate today.

Her most recent book, The British Industrial Canal - Reading the Waterways from the Eighteenth Century to the Anthropocene, was published in 2023. She was invited to contribute to the Bingley 250 celebrations by the Canal and River Trust, custodians of 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales. The day of celebrations drew thousands of people to this 'wonder of the waterways'.

Receptive audience for difficult issues

The waterways were vital in the rapid development of industry in West Yorkshire at a time when roads were poor and land carriage expensive, but they didn't only carry coal. The Five Rise Locks, which take boats through an 18-metre rise on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, were part of a network that moved imported slave-produced commodities including cotton and sugar from ports to inland processing sites. One of the reasons slave ports like Liverpool became successful was because of improved communications inland.

Despite Professor Matthews raising these uncomfortable issues in her talk, she says that the audience at the anniversary event were very open to thinking about the diverse histories the Five Rise Locks and the canals more broadly were a part of.

"I went in with no assumptions about what people at the event knew or thought about the transatlantic slave trade, and while some local historians were well aware of the exploitative overseas labour practices that brought raw materials to mills and factories in the region, others had not thought about it.

Professor Jodie Matthews

Director Enterprise & Knowledge Exchange, Department Communication & Humanities

Despite being part of a big celebration event, my talk asked people to reflect on the darker aspects of our industrial success. It was good to talk about the ways in which literature can tell us things about the past, how people felt and thought about the commodities they worked with, wore, ate or smoked.

"I tried to show that there were lots of connections that people had not thought about before. My perspective is that we should feel something about the goods that we consume and the people who made them, whether that's today or reflecting on those relationships hundreds of years ago.

"There is occasionally some resistance to thinking about the canals like this - 'making the waterways woke' - but it is part of a reckoning with uncomfortable shared histories that a lot of organisations are now coming to terms with. The audience at Bingley asked excellent questions and made some fascinating observations - my research is always enhanced by the contributions people make at events like this."

Canals link inland areas to global trade

While cities with ports on the coast such as Liverpool and Bristol have had clear, direct links to the slave trade, places further inland have been perceived to be further away from the ramifications of slavery. But as Professor Matthews points out, money made from the slave trade was invested in building the canals while the waterways themselves were a crucial link in the chain.

"The phrase 'raw materials for the textile trade from Liverpool' hides a lot. The textile trade is human - where those raw materials came from and, crucially, who produced them has traditionally been silenced.

"Places like Liverpool would not have been so successful in the slave trade were it not for their connections with the hinterland. Sugar needed refining somewhere, cotton was being taken away by water inland to Lancashire, then back to Liverpool for export. That is the story that literature can help to tell."

Locks still a marvel 250 years on

Despite Bingley's locks - there are another three a short distance from the Five Rise - now heading towards a fourth century of use, their use of water still has relevance for Professor Matthews as use of the precious commodity comes more into focus in light of climate crisis.

"What is stunning about the Five Rise Locks is how it is so vertiginous when you stand at the top of it. The technological marvel of moving that much water uphill, defying gravity, is still a thrilling aspect of what those locks do. Locks like this use thousands of tonnes of water, and the historic structures themselves are at risk from extreme weather events."

Photo by Nicola Terry on Unsplash