History
The River Adur is formed when the Western Adur and the Eastern Adur join near Henfold. The Western branch starts near Slinfold, and flows through Shipley and West Grinstead. The Eastern branch rises on Ditchling Common, and flows through Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill. Below the junction, the combined stream flows for 10.8 miles (17.4 km) to reach the English Channel at the port of Shoreham-by-Sea. Under an act of Parliament obtained in 1807, the river was improved, to aid both navigation and drainage, and barges could reach Bines Bridge on the Western Adur.
In 1824, the civil engineer May Upton produced a plan for extending the navigation northwards to West Grinstead, at a cost of just under £6,000. This formed the basis for another act of Parliament, which was obtained in 1825, and created the Baybridge Canal Company. Seven men were named as proprietors, including Lord Selsey and Sir Charles Merrick Burrell, and they were empowered to raise £6,000 by issuing shares, and an additional £3,000 by mortgages if required. Although called a canal, it was essentially a river navigation, as it followed the course of the river to West Grinstead, to terminate at a wharf near the Worthing to Horsham turnpike road, now the A24.
The canal ran for 3.5 miles (5.6 km) from Bines Bridge to the wharf at Baybridge. There were two locks, designed for boats which were 75 by 12.5 feet (23 by 3.8 m), each with a 7 foot rise. All of the route was within the parish of West Grinstead, and the construction work was completed in 1826. The main trade was manure, coal and chalk. The canal closed on 1 September 1875 due to competition from the railways, having been little used after the opening of the railway from Shoreham to West Grinstead in 1861.
Read more about this topic: Baybridge Canal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)