Swindon: Canals in an Urban Landscape
The North Wilts Canal’s construction,
Almost mirrors those fraught years
From 1815 to 1819,
When the country seemed on the brink of revolution:
The Corn Laws, the Spa Fields Riots, the March of the Blanketeers,
The Pentridge Rising, the Spenceans, the Cato Street Conspiracy,
The suspension of Habeas Corpus, the Gagging Acts, the Six Acts, Peterloo,
And it’s easy to forget that in 1812,
More troops were stationed in the Luddite counties,
Than were used to oppose the French in the Peninsular War.
It wasn’t like the Byrds, Eight Miles High,
But it was eight miles long,
Connecting the Wilts and Berks Canal and the Thames and Severn Canal,
So, in a manner of speaking, it conjoined four rivers:
The Kennet, the Avon, the Thames and the Severn;
A dozen locks carried it sixty feet upwards from Latton,
To join the Wilts and Berks where you now might shop in Debenhams;
Tunnels and wharves and aqueducts and bridges,
Coal and grain and bricks and slate and salt and flour and malt,
And iron and timber and clay and warehouses,
And a reservoir at Coate Water,
And motorways and roads and shops and offices and houses –
But where do we go when the concrete comes to Coate?
A canal-cut reservoir at Coate Water,
A manuscript of field, sky and lake-land
For Richard Jefferies and his muse,
Wandering east from England’s Chicago.
Recreation for Railway families,
Who couldn’t afford the annual Trip,
Just trying to forget the Great War
And short-time working.
It’s where my mother dived deep into the waves
Wind-whipped and keen before the polio scare,
And where mum and dad courted before the War.
It’s where I paddled in the 1950’s,
Thrilled by miniature railway rides,
Egg sandwiches and ice cream cornets,
In long summer holiday equal measure,
Until the smell of creosote and Woodbines
Wafted through the wooden changing rooms,
With the 11Plus, The Beatles,
And Don Rogers on a thousand transistor radios.
It’s where young men impressed their girl friends
With a clean sweep of the oars from out the boathouse,
Cries of joy echoing in the willowed, muddied banks,
While the great crested grebe stared up to the Downs
And the thatched cottages up in Hodson,
“The Gamekeeper At Home”, still.
You can see all these memories reflected in the waters,
You can see all of yours too:
Take a walk and peer into the shifting surface,
There they are just waiting to be netted,
With the rod and line of recollection,
But where will they all go when the concrete comes?