Manchester Ship Canal
The great ship canal that made Manchester a seaport, running 36 miles inland from the Mersey to Salford Quays
The Manchester Ship Canal is a different kind of waterway from the narrow canals around it: a deep-water ship canal, 36 miles long, built to bring ocean-going vessels right into the heart of the city. It runs from Eastham on the Mersey estuary, opposite Liverpool, inland past Warrington and Runcorn to the docks at Salford Quays, on the edge of Manchester. Ships are lifted about sixty feet through five sets of large locks between the estuary and the terminal basins.
It remains a working commercial waterway, owned and run by a ports company rather than the canal trust, and it is not a leisure route in the way the others in this section are — there is no continuous public towpath, and pleasure craft use it only by arrangement. What draws visitors is the engineering. At Barton the Bridgewater Canal is carried clean over the ship canal on a swing aqueduct, a great iron trough that pivots to let ships through, alongside a swing road bridge. Salford Quays, once the terminal docks, has been rebuilt as a waterside district around MediaCity and the Lowry.
The canal opened in 1894, after six years of construction that made it one of the largest civil engineering works of Victorian Britain. Manchester’s merchants had it built to escape the high dock and railway charges at Liverpool: by cutting a ship canal inland, an industrial city forty miles from the sea turned itself into one of the country’s busiest ports almost overnight.
The lower reaches near Eastham and Ellesmere Port still handle real shipping and tanker traffic, and the whole line runs beside, and at times merges with, the tidal Mersey.
