Grosvenor Canal - History

History

In the early eighteenth century, there were marshes and a tidal creek on the north bank of the Thames near Pimlico. The Chelsea Waterworks Company obtained an Act of Parliament in 1722; they were authorised to take water from the Thames via one of more "Cutt or Cutts". These fed the water into the marshes, and a tide mill was used to pump the water to reservoirs at Hyde Park and St James's Park as the tide ebbed. The reservoirs supplied west London with drinking water. The land between the river and the later site of Victoria Station was owned by Sir Richard Grosvenor, who leased it to the company in 1724. They enlarged the existing creek and built the tide mill, which continued to work until 1775, after which the pumping was performed by a steam engine.

The company were able to take water directly from the Thames following the granting of another Act of Parliament in 1809. They continued to lease the land until 1823, when the lease expired. In the following year, the Earl of Grosvenor then decided to turn the creek into a canal, building a lock near the junction with the Thames and a basin at the upper end, around 0.75 miles (1.21 km) inland. Most of the commercial traffic appears to have been coal, to supply the neighbourhood. The resident engineer for the construction of the tidal lock and upper basin was John Armstrong, originally from Ingram in Northumberland. Having trained as a millwright in Newcastle, he worked on a number of bridge projects under several of the major civil engineers of the time, including Thomas Telford, William Jessop and John Rennie, before taking on the Grosvenor Canal project. It was one of the few times he worked independently as a civil engineer. The canal opened in 1824, and Chelsea Waterworks continued to extract water from it, until the passing of the Metropolis Water Act in 1852, which prohibited extraction from the Thames below Teddington Lock. They moved to Seething Wells, Surbiton in 1856.

The canal originally stretched from the Thames near Chelsea Bridge to Grosvenor Basin on the current site of Victoria station. It is difficult to tell whether all of the clear area marked Grosvenor Basin on the 1850 map was actually water, but the size of the basin was described as "immense" in 1878. When the station was built around 1858, the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway obtained an Act of Parliament which ratified an agreement between them and the Duke of Westminster, allowing the station to be built on the basin site, and a new towpath to be constructed between Ebury Bridge and Eccleston Bridge. The station opened on 1 October 1860. As the railways continued to expand, more room was needed, and another Act was obtained by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in 1899, which allowed the canal above Ebury Bridge to be closed. This took place around 1902, resulting in the canal being half its original length. Since 1866, a local authority called the Vestry of St George, Hanover Square had used the canal to transport household refuse away from the area. They were based close to the end of the canal at Ebury Bridge. Following the cutback of the canal to this point, the Duke of Westminster sold what was left of the canal to Westminster City Council, and its primary function became rubbish removal.

Around 1925 it was halved in length again to allow Ebury Bridge Estate to be built by Westminster City Council. The lower portion of the canal was kept as a dock, allowing the council to continue loading barges with rubbish. In July 1928, the canal closed for nearly a year, while major improvements were made to facilitate the barge traffic. At its peak, 8,000 tons of refuse were loaded onto barges each week, and the barge traffic lasted until 1995, making it the last canal in commercial operation in London. The area has since been redeveloped as Grosvenor Waterside. The lock and the basin between it and the Thames have been retained, as has some of the upper basin. The lock has three sets of gates, two facing away from the Thames, and a third set facing towards the Thames, to cope with high tides where the river level exceeds that in the canal. The third set was first fitted some time between 1896 and 1916.