Regional Round-up South - November 2025

Opening doors in the West Midlands

In September, we welcomed visitors to the Bradley workshop in the West Midlands as part of this year’s national Heritage Open Days celebrations.

Usually closed to the general public, the workshop is one of only two sites in the country where skilled craftspeople hand-build the giant lock gates that keep our canals flowing.

“We’re delighted to welcome the public behind the scenes at Bradley lock gate workshop,” community events coordinator Julianne Joyce said in the run-up to the event. “This is a rare chance to celebrate the heritage that has shaped communities across the West Midlands.”

On the day, visitors were treated to a guided tour of the workshop, seeing firsthand how our dedicated team employ traditional woodworking skills to construct and maintain our lock gates.

There were also talks and demonstrations, delving deeper into the history of our waterways and explaining how we care for our 200-year-old network today. And for the younger visitors, there were plenty of fun family activities to bring our wonderful canal heritage to life.

“Our charity is proud to look after these special places,” Julianne added, “but we can only do it with the public’s support. We’d love people who are inspired by the tour to think about volunteering or donating to help us look after our regional canals.”

Making the cut in North Wales

A six-foot LEGO model of the iconic Pontcysyllte Aqueduct has been created as part of a campaign that could see the design incorporated into the legendary brand’s global collection.

If successful, the awe-inspiring structure, dubbed the ‘stream in the sky’, would be the first Welsh landmark to make it into Lego’s world-famous repertoire and only the fourth from the UK, after Big Ben, Tower Bridge, Old Trafford Stadium, and Trafalgar Square.

Commissioned as part of a year-long community art project, the detailed model of this UNESCO World Heritage Site, which includes all nineteen pillars, the River Dee, and a canal boat making a crossing, has been on display at events throughout Wales this summer. It is also set to be displayed in the library at the Institute of Civil Engineering in a section dedicated to Thomas Telford later this year. It’s fitting, as for nearly four decades, from 1962 to 2000, the city was home to British LEGO

“Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is one of the true icons of the waterways,” says regional director for Wales at Glandŵr Cymru, Ben Cottam. “The possibility of it being added into LEGO's global collection with both the historic links it has to this part of Wales and the popularity LEGO has worldwide is incredibly fitting.”

We’re encouraging all our supporters to back the campaign and visit the LEGO website to help us reach the 10,000 online votes required to make the cut. Who knows, in a few years, you could be building a miniature version of this towering engineering masterpiece in your own front room.

Going with the flow on the South Oxford Canal

Last summer was the hottest in the UK since records began, with temperatures reaching the mid-30s in some parts of the South East. This unprecedented weather poses unique challenges for our ageing network, as we saw on the South Oxford Canal.

“I’ve worked on canals for over 35 years,” says area operations manager, Lee King, “and I’ve never seen a year like this. We went from one of the wettest winters in living memory, with severe flooding and record water levels, to the driest spring and summer in the last hundred years.”

The South Oxford Canal is a busy and vital route towards the Thames and popular with boaters, paddlers, and tourists, but due to the extreme weather this summer, Lee and the team struggled to keep it open.

The canal is fed by several reservoirs, at Wormleighton, Boddington, and Clattercote, which are replenished whenever it rains. However, with such prolonged dry spells, these were severely depleted.

It meant the team was almost entirely reliant on the canal’s pumping system, which takes water from the nearby River Swift and moves it uphill to refill the summit pound and maintain water levels.

Sadly, despite their heroic efforts to manage water levels including restrictions on lock usage, pump operations and an interesting heritage technique using ash from old steam trains to block leaks in lock gates, stoppages were inevitable. To conserve water, help keep boats afloat, and protect the canal’s infrastructure, certain sections of the waterway had to be closed at various intervals.

Restrictions, like the ones imposed on the South Oxford Canal, are becoming more common, as our changing climate makes it harder and harder to maintain water levels and keep our canals open. However, with your support and the help of our dedicated staff and volunteers, we’ll continue to do all we can to keep our canals flowing.