British Canals

The first edition of British Canals was published in 1950 and was much admired as a pioneering work in transport history. Joseph Boughey, with the advice of Charles Hadfield, has previously revised and updated the perennially popular material to reflect more recent changes.

For this ninth edition, Joseph Boughey discusses the many new discoveries and advances in the world of canals around Britain, inevitably focussing on the twentieth century to a far greater extent than in any previous edition of this book, while still within the context of Hadfield's original work.

About the Authors

Joseph Boughey is one of Britain's leading canal historians. Interested in British and Irish waterways since boyhood, he taught estate management and environmental management and planning at Liverpool John Moores University until 2010. He wrote Canal Man and More (Sutton, 1998) about Charles Hadfield's involvement with waterways. He is especially interested in twentieth-century waterways history and the history and politics of conservation.

He has written for the Journal of Transport History, the Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society and the Waterways Journal, for which he was on the editorial board. He was a Council member of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, and a Trustee of the Raymond Williams Foundation. He has spoken about Rolt on television and was 'canal consultant' for the series Canals: The Making of A Nation. Since 2013, he has had a regular column in Narrowboat magazine.

Charles Hadfield (1909–1996) was a pioneer in the history of British canals, and was, for much of his lifetime, the world's leading canal historian. He wrote twenty-two books and played a major part in the making of post-war waterways history.