History
Although it was only 1,034 yards long (945m) it was, in its prime, an important industrial branch and it had its own short arm leading to private wharfs. It was lock free and throughout its working life it was extensively used. It had coal, sand and salt wharfs, a scrap iron wharf and various works along its banks. An interesting works was Molineux, Webb, & Company’s Glass Works situated at the head of the branch where flint glass products were made.
In 1801, Samuel Oldknow, then the Chairman of the Peak Forest Canal Company, offered an Edward Stelfox £50 towards the cost of building two lime kilns on the banks of the Ashton Canal on the condition that he burned limestone brought along the Peak Forest Canal. The site of these kilns is unknown but it is suspected that they were somewhere on this branch near Limekiln Lane.
From the junction with the Ashton Canal, the branch ran to the north-west, until it passed under Mill Street. There was a sharp turn immediately beyond the bridge, and it continued in a north-easterly direction. It remained in use until the 1950s but by this time it was slowly becoming derelict. However, part of it remained open and British Waterways now has a yard there.
Read more about this topic: Islington Branch Canal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)