History
The canal was authorised in 1792 and was probably open in 1796. The cost of construction was about £5000 and the completed canal could take barges of 60-70 tons. It was meant to carry goods to Cheltenham but the local geography made that impossible. There was a gap of nearly five miles between the canal and the town, so the canal was not as useful as it might have been. In 1810 the canal was leased to a group of three men for £400 per annum. In 1822 the canal was leased to a number of committeemen from the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. In 1829 they renewed their lease for another 21 years at £500 per annum and in 1844 offered to buy the canal for £8,750, but they later withdrew the offer. In 1849 the lease was taken up by the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, which was unable to make the canal pay, and when it surrendered the lease in 1867 cargo fell to 1,800 tons per annum. The Coombe Hill Canal company then asked the engineer of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to provide a report. The report took the view that the canal could not be made profitable and it would be best turned into an oyster bed. Despite this the canal company tried to run the canal itself for a few years before selling it for £520 in 1871.
The canal was resold for £1000 in 1873 but in 1876 it was abandoned due to the new owners being unable to afford to repair flood damage to the lock that connected it to the River Severn.
Read more about this topic: Coombe Hill Canal
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)