Infinitum

Bedlam

The Bethlem Royal Hospital of London is a psychiatric hospital in Beckenham, south east London. Although no longer in its original location and buildings, it is recognised as the world’s first and oldest institution to specialise in the mentally ill. It has been variously known as St. Mary Bethlehem, Bethlem Hospital, Bethlehem Hospital and Bedlam.

The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from its name. Although the hospital is now at the forefront of humane psychiatric treatment, for much of its history it was notorious for cruelty and inhumane treatment – the epitome of what the term “madhouse” connotes to the modern reader.

History of Bethlem

Bethlem has been a part of London since 1247, first as a priory for the sisters and brethren of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, from where the building took its name. Its first site was in Bishopsgate (where Liverpool Street station now stands). In 1330 it became a hospital, and it admitted some mentally ill patients from 1357, but did not become a dedicated psychiatric hospital until later. Early sixteenth century maps show Bedlam, next to Bishopsgate, as a courtyard with a few stone buildings, a church and a garden. Conditions were consistently dreadful, and the care amounted to little more than restraint. There were 31 patients and the noise was “so hideous, so great; that they are more able to drive a man that hath his wits rather out of them.” Violent or dangerous patients were manacled and chained to the floor or wall. Some were allowed to leave, and licensed to beg. It was a Royal hospital, but controlled by the City of London after 1557, and managed by the Governors of Bridewell. Day to day management was in the hands of a Keeper, who received payment for each patient from their parish, livery company, or relatives. In 1598 an inspection showed neglect; the “Great Vault” (cesspit) badly needed emptying, and the kitchen drains needed replacing. There were 20 patients there, one of whom had been there over 25 years.

In 1620, patients of Bethlem banded together and sent a “Petition of the Poor Distracted People in the House of Bedlam (concerned with conditions for inmates)” to theHouse of Lords.

The Hospital became famous and notorious for the brutal ill-treatment meted out to the mentally ill. In 1675 Bedlam moved to new buildings in Moorfields designed byRobert Hooke, outside the City boundary. The playwright Nathaniel Lee was incarcerated there for five years, reporting that: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”^[1]

The lunatics were first called “patients” in 1700, and “curable” and “incurable” wards were opened in 1725-34. In the 18th century people used to go to Bedlam to stare at the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the freaks of the “show of Bethlehem” and laugh at their antics, generally of a sexual nature or violent fights. Entry was free on the first Tuesday of the month. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits.

Bedlam

In 1815, Bedlam was moved to St George’s Fields, Southwark (into buildings—designed by Sydney Smirke—now used to house the Imperial War Museum), where the inmates were referred to as “unfortunates”. This building had a remarkable library as an annex which was well frequented. Although the sexes were separated, in the evenings, those capable of appreciating music could dance together in the great ballroom. In the chapel the sexes were separated by a curtain. Finally, in 1930, the hospital was moved to an outer suburb of London, on the site of Monks Orchard House between Eden Park, Beckenham and Shirley.

In the early modern period it was widely believed that patients discharged from Bethlem Hospital were licensed to beg, though in 1675 the Governors denied this. They were known as Abraham-men or Tom o’ Bedlam. They usually wore a tin plate on their arm as a badge and were also known as Bedlamers, Bedlamites, or Bedlam Beggars. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester’s son Edgar takes the role of a Bedlam Beggar in order to remain in England unnoticed after banishment. Whether any were ever licensed is uncertain. There were probably far more who claimed falsely to have been inmates than were ever admitted to the hospital.

In 1997 the Bethlem hospital started planning celebrations of its history on the occasion of its 750th anniversary. The service user perspective was not to be included, however, and members of the Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement saw nothing to celebrate in either the original Bedlam or in current mental health care. A campaign called “Reclaim Bedlam” was launched by Pete Shaugnessey, which was supported by hundreds of patients and ex-patients and widely reported in the media. A sit-in was held outside the original Bedlam site at the Imperial War Museum. Historian Roy Porter has called the Bethlem Hospital “a symbol for man’s inhumanity to man, for callousness and cruelty.”

Tags: Bedlam, insanity, mental health

Out of place artifacts

1. In 1967, at a depth of 400 feet underground in the Rocky Point Mine in Gulman, Colorado, human bones and a four-inch-long copper arrowhead were found embedded in a silver vein. According to geologists, the rock deposit was several million years old, so neither bone nor arrowhead belongs there. Because there was no way to fit this into conventional theories like evolution, the find made a few headlines, and then was conveniently forgotten.

2. The June 1851 issue of Scientific American reported that an explosive charge blew a metal vase out of solid rock in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The story said, “On putting the two parts together it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the sides there are six figures of a flower, a bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel, a vine, or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning craftsman. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of solid pudding stone, fifteen feet below the surface.”

Nobody ever figured out who made the vessel, though an attempt to date the rock it came from gave a figure of several million years. The vase circulated between museums for a while before it disappeared; presumably it is lying forgotten in some curator’s basement.

3. In 1891 Mrs. S. W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shoveling coal into her stove when a piece of coal broke in two, revealing a gold chain that held the two pieces together. Nobody could explain how the gold chain got into the coal, since most coal is supposedly 300 million years old. A similar discovery was made in Oklahoma in 1912, when an iron pot resembling Aladdin’s lamp was found embedded in coal. Unlike most the other ooparts, the whereabouts of this one are apparently known, because I recently saw a photograph of it in a book.

4. While we’re talking about coal, Ed Conrad, a reporter from eastern Pennsylvania, recently announced that he had found human bone fragments in the coal deposits of his home state. He reminds us that if coal comes from the Carboniferous period, as evolutionists assert, then even dinosaur bones found in it will cause paleontologists serious problems. And that’s not all; he has pictures of a human skull, a long piece of tooled wood resembling an axe handle, and even some soft body parts (he identified a brown loaf-shaped object as a petrified human lung). Skeptics immediately said they were nothing more than rocks, so in May 1997 Conrad posted his pictures on the Internet, ensuring that scientists won’t conveniently forget this discovery. His conclusion? Our methods for dating rocks and fossils are FUBAR (an army term meaning “fouled-up beyond all recognition”).

5. In 1851 a businessman named Hiram de Witt dropped a fist-sized piece of quartz he had found in California; it broke in two to reveal an iron sixpenny nail in almost perfect condition! Six years earlier another nail was found embedded in a granite block from the Kindgoodie Quarry in northern Britain. A two-inch metal screw was discovered in a piece of feldspar from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada, in 1865. The rocks containing these nails and screws are supposedly millions of years old–unless our techniques for dating rocks are more out of whack than geologists will admit.

There are also ooparts which come from civilizations we already know about, which show a technology far ahead of what we credit those people with. Many of them were cited in Von Daniken’s books, so you may have heard of some of these:

6. Several two-thousand-year-old clay pots have been found near Baghdad, each containing a cylinder of copper and a rod of iron; the tops were sealed with asphalt. Both cylinders and rods showed signs of acid corrosion. When copper sulfate, acetic acid or citric acid (all were known to chemists in classical times) was poured inside, the iron rods gave off an electrical charge of 1 1/2 volts, the same as today’s Eveready batteries! Yet in encyclopedias you will read that Alessandro Volta invented the battery, around the year 1800.

It is thought that the Baghdad batteries were used to electroplate gold onto jewelry, a technique modern man developed in the nineteenth century. Yet gold items thin enough to have been electroplated have turned up at archaeological sites in Egypt and Iraq, some of them in deposits as old as 2000 B.C.

7. Various Peruvian artifacts made of platinum have turned up at pre-Inca (before 1200 A.D.) sites. Platinum, however, requires a temperature of 1,755 C. before it melts. How the ancient South American jewelers produced such high temperatures in their forges and furnaces has not been explained.

8. When the Chinese excavated the tomb of Zhou Zhu, a general who lived from 265 to 316 A.D., they found an ornate metal belt-fastener. Analysis of the metal in the fastener showed it to be an alloy of 5 percent manganese, 10 percent copper–and 85 percent aluminum. When I studied chemistry in school, I was taught that aluminum was discovered in 1803, and the processes involving in smelting it consume so much energy that aluminum could not be used on a large scale until the 1940s. How did the ancient Chinese work this metal?

9. In the courtyard of the Qutb Minar, the largest mosque of Delhi, India, stands an iron pillar confiscated from a demolished Hindu temple. Called the Ashoka Pillar, we know it to be at least 15 centuries old, because it contains an inscription from the Indian king Chandragupta II, who died in 413 A.D. It is more than 23 feet tall, sixteen inches wide, and weighs six tons, so casting it was a major task in itself. What is more amazing, although it has been outdoors, exposed to the monsoon climate of north India, for centuries, it shows only a few traces of rust, in a tropical environment that would have corroded any other piece of iron long ago. Apparently the ancients had metallurgical techniques that have been forgotten over the ages.

Professor Clifford Wilson got a first-hand look at an unusual metal artifact while working at the Australian Institute of Archaeology. One day the institute received from Israel a bronze statue of the ancient Canaanite god Baal. It had a leg missing, and they tried to replace it so it would look good in a museum display. When they hired metalworkers to make the new leg, they found the original bronze was harder than any they could make. Wilson concluded that the ancient bronze workers of the holy land used a technique similar to the one used when the Japanese made samurai swords: the metal used in the sword was cast in a block shape, hammered into a sheet, and then recast; this was done many times before they shaped it into the final blade. Every time they hammered the metal it became harder than it had been previously.

10. In 1900 sponge divers working off the Greek island of Antikytheros found a ship full of bronze statues and other artifacts, which sank between 80 and 50 B.C. One of the finds, a corroded lump of bronze and wood, was sent to the National Museum in Athens. Nobody could figure out what it was until 1958, when Dr. Derek J. De Solla Price of Cambridge University tried to rebuild the device. To his amazement, it turned out to be an intricate clock, used to tell not only the time of day, but also the risings, settings, and phases of the moon, and the positions of five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), all with astonishing accuracy. The reconstructed machine was a small box containing more than twenty gears, intermeshed in a differential arrangement. A crank spindle set all of this into motion, and was turned by an unknown power source not preserved in the shipwreck. Here is a video showing the rebuilt gearbox in action:

Classical historians like to claim that the ancient Greeks were the smartest people who lived before us, and have written whole books on certain aspects of their intellectual accomplishments, like philosophy, art, and literature. The Greeks, however, were terribly impractical when it came to applying their knowledge. For example, around 200 B.C. a Greek named Hero invented a steam turbine, but he couldn’t think of a practical use for it! To him it was just a toy, and he ended up using it to open and close the doors of a temple in Alexandria, fooling the gullible into thinking the gods or some kind of magic opened those doors. It remained for the steam engine to be reinvented in England nearly 2,000 years later.(16) To the Greeks, anything involving manual labor was something true thinkers should avoid, so they never developed machinery, letting their whole civilization run on the strength of animals and slaves instead of steam power. This clock or computer which turned up in the Greek shipwreck would not have been built by somebody with a typical Greek mind set. Therefore it is more likely that the technology behind it came from an older, more advanced culture, perhaps even that of the pre-Flood world.

11. In 1898 a bird-shaped model made out of sycamore wood was found in an Egyptian tomb at Saqqara, dated to 200 B.C. It was labeled as a “bird object” and put in the Cairo Museum’s basement, where it lay in a box for the next 71 years. In 1969 Dr. Kalil Messiha found it while cleaning out part of the basement, and noticed an un-birdlike feature: the object has a bird’s head, but the tail of a modern airplane. After examination by several aerodynamic engineers and pilots, they concluded that it was not really a bird, but a model airplane; not only is it designed according to well-known aerodynamic features, but it glides a respectable distance with a slight toss from the hand! Since then thirteen more gliders have been identified from other Egyptian tombs, leading Dr. Messiha to wonder if a full-sized glider is lying under the sands of Egypt, waiting to be discovered.

12. The Columbian government has in its possession a number of gold objects found in the graves of the Sinu, a pre-Inca tribe that lived in northern Columbia between 500 and 800 A.D. After they made a tour of the United States, one of them, described as vaguely animal-like, caused a sensation when Ivan Sanderson got a cast made from it in 1969. Sanderson noticed several unusual features not found in animals, like delta wings located far back on the body and a tail like that of a modern aircraft. He and several aerodynamic engineers tested it in a wind tunnel and found it “flew” quite well. Their conclusion was that it did not represent any kind of winged animal (not a bird, bat, insect, flying fish, skate or ray), but it was a jet plane! As with the Saqqara glider, several more objects like it have been found, which are in museums today. Where did our ancestors learn to fly?

13. The western Chinese province of Qinghai is located on the Tibetan plateau, so most of it is a cold desert, with an average elevation nearly two miles above sea level. The province is so remote that it did not become part of China until 1723; for most of history Chinese settlement stopped–along with the Great Wall–in Gansu, the next province to the east. That explains why the outside world did not hear about the Baigong Pipes until 2002, when a group of US scientists, looking for dinosaur fossils in the Qinghai mountains, stumbled upon the site.

Twenty-five miles southeast of Delingha, a city in the heart of Qinghai, is a strange mountain, Mt. Baigong. On top of the mountain is what appears to be an eroded pyramid, 200 feet high. At the mountain’s base are three caves, two of which have collapsed over the ages. The cave that can be entered has a triangular opening, and a 16-inch pipe running along the ceiling. The end of a second pipe comes out of the cave floor, and dozens more such pipes stick out of the face of Mt. Baigong, above the cave. Still more pipe-like features have been spotted on the beach of a nearby lake. An analysis of the pipes by a local smeltery stated they were made mostly of iron, but also contained silicon dioxide, in amounts up to 30 percent–not a common alloy in manmade metals.

The local government is promoting Mt. Baigong as a tourist attraction, but so far a thorough investigation of the site has not yet been performed, by either Chinese or foreign scientists. As you might expect, in the meantime, UFO enthusiasts are promoting them as evidence that aliens once visited earth. Using the theme promoted in this section, I would instead suggest that this was an ancient manmade building; the last surviving base or bunker from a pre-Flood war, perhaps? Meanwhile, some geologists are calling everything at Mt. Baigong a natural formation, because similar hematite “pipes” have been found in the sandstone of Utah and neighboring states. If the Baigong Pipes turn out to have been formed by nature, kindly disregard this oopart.

Tags: pre-flood

El Badi Palace

El Badi Palace (Arabic: قصر البديع‎ – meaning the incomparable palace) is located in Marrakech, Morocco, and it consists nowadays of the remnants of a magnificent palace built by the Saadian king Ahmad al-Mansur in 1578.

The original building is thought to have consisted of 360 rooms, a courtyard of 135 m by 110 m and a pool of 90 m by 20 m, richly decorated with Italian marbles and large amounts of gold imported from Sudan. It also has a small, underground, tunnel-like jail with about four cells where the king kept his prisoners. Unfortunately, this fairy-like palace, which took approximately 25 years to construct, was torn apart by the Alaouite Sultan Mawlay Ismail who used the materials to decorate his own palace in Meknes. The design of the palace is influenced by the Alhambra in Granada.

In one of the refurbished pavilions, the Koutoubia minbar is now on exhibition.

Tags: Marrakech, Places

Holophusikon

The Holophusikon (or Holophusicon, also known as the Leverian Museum) was a museum of natural curiosities exhibited at Leicester House, on Leicester Square in London, England, from 1775 to 1786 by Ashton Lever. The collection was acquired by a James Parkinson (not the famous doctor) through a lottery in 1786, but continued to be displayed at Leicester House until Lever’s death in 1788. Parkinson then moved the collection to a Rotunda at No. 3 Blackfriars Road, before it was dispersed in an auction in 1806. The museum took its name from its supposedly universal coverage of natural history, and was essentially a huge cabinet of curiosities.

Lever collected fossils, shells, and animals (birds, insects, reptiles, fish, monkeys) for many years, accumulating a large collection at his home at Alkrington, near Manchester. He was swamped with visitors, whom he allowed to view his collection for free, so much so that he had to insist that visitors that arrived on foot would not be admitted. He decided to exhibit the collection in London as a commercial venture, charging an entrance fee.

Lever acquired a lease of Leicester House in 1774, converting the principal rooms on the first floor into a single large gallery running the length of the house, and opened his museum in February 1775, with around 25,000 exhibits (a small fraction of his collection) valued at over £40,000. The display included many natural and ethnographic items gathered by Captain James Cook on his voyages.

Lever charged an entry fee of 5s. 3d., or two guineas for an annual ticket, and the museum had a degree of commercial success: the receipts in 1782 were £2,253. In an effort to draw in the crowds, Lever later reduced the entrance fee to half a crown (2s. 6d.), and was constantly looking for new exhibits. He also set out his exhibits to impress the visitor, as well as (unusually) including educational information. However, he spent more on new exhibits than he raised in entrance fees.

The British Museum and Catherine II of Russia both refused to buy the collection, so Lever obtained an Act of Parliament in 1784 to sell the whole by lottery. He only sold 8,000 tickets at a guinea each – he had hoped for 36,000 - and it was then broken up by a James Parkinson (not the famous doctor). It was displayed at Leicester House until Lever’s death in 1788, at a reduced entrance fee of 1s., and Parkinson then transferred it to a Rotunda at No. 3 Blackfriars Road. Leicester House was then demolished in 1791.

Parkinson sold the collection in lots by auction in 1806. Many items were bought by collectors such as Edward Donovan, Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby and William Bullock; many items also went to other museums, such as the Imperial Museum of Vienna. The contents of the museum are unusually well recorded, from a catalogue of the museum created in 1784, and the sale catalogue in 1806, together with a contemporary series of watercolours of its contents by Sarah Stone.

Tags: collection, museum, natural history

The Egyptian Hall

Egyptian hall

The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, commissioned by William Bullock as a museum to house his collection (which included curiosities brought back from the South Seas by Captain Cook), was completed in 1812 at a cost of £16,000. It was the first building in England to be influenced by the Egyptian style, partly inspired by the success of the Egyptian Room in Thomas Hope’s house in Duchess Street, which was open to the public and had been well illustrated in Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1807). But, unlike Bullock’s Egyptian temple in Piccadilly, Hope’sneoclassical façade betrayed no hint of the Egyptianizing decor it contained. Detailed renderings of various temples on the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx had been accumulating for connoisseurs and designers in works such as Bernard de Montfaucon’s, ten-volume L’Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1719-1724), which reproduces, methodically grouped, all the ancient monuments, Benoît de Maillet, Description de l’Égypte (1735), Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743), and Frederic Louis Norden, Voyage d’Egypte et de Nubie (1755); the first volume of the magisterial Description de l’Egypte (1810) had recently appeared in Paris. The plans for the hall were drawn up by architect Peter Frederick Robinson.^[4] Bullock, who had displayed his collection inSheffield and Liverpool before opening in London, used the hall to put on various spectaculars, from which he made money from ticket sales. The museum was variously referred to as the London Museum, the Egyptian Hall or Museum, or Bullock’s Museum.

The Hall was a considerable success, with an exhibition of Napoleonic era relics in 1816 including Napoleon’s carriage taken at Waterloo being seen by about 220,000 visitors; Bullock made £35,000. In 1819, Bullock sold his ethnographical and natural history collection at auction and converted the museum into an exhibition hall. Subsequently the Hall became a major venue for the exhibiting of works of art; it had the advantage of being almost the only London venue able to exhibit really large works. Usually admission was one shilling. In 1820, The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault was exhibited from June 10 until the end of the year, rather overshadowing Benjamin Robert Haydon’s painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, on show in an adjacent room; Haydon rented rooms to show his work on several occasions. In 1821, exhibitions included Belzoni’s show of the tomb of Seti I in 1821, and James Ward’s gigantic Allegory of Waterloo. In 1822, a family of Laplanders with their reindeer were imported to be displayed in front of a painted backdrop, and give short sleigh-rides to visitors.

The bookseller George Lackington became owner of the Hall in 1825 and went on to use the facilities to show panoramas, art exhibits, and entertainment productions. The Hall became especially associated with watercolours. The Old Water-Colour Society exhibited there in 1821–22 and it was hired by Charles Heath to display the watercolours commissioned by from Joseph Mallord William Turnerforming Picturesque Views in England and Wales. Turner exhibited at the Hall for a number of years and it was also used as a venue for exhibitions by the Society of Painters in Water Colours.

In the “Dudley Gallery” at the Egyptian Hall, the valuable collection of pictures belonging to the Earl of Dudley was deposited during the erection of his own gallery at Dudley House in Park Lane. The room gave its name to the Dudley Gallery Art Society (also known as The Old Dudley Art Society) when they were founded in 1861 and used it for their exhibitions. It was the venue chosen for their first exhibitions by the influential New English Art Club.

By the end of the 19th century, the Hall was also associated with magic and spiritualism as a number of performers and lecturers had hired it for shows. It was also the venue chosen for the showing of some of the first ever films (or animated photographs) to be shown, including those of Albert Smith relating his ascent of Mont Blanc. Later, when the hall came under the control of the Maskelyne family, a more settled policy was adopted and it soon became known as England’s Home of Mystery. Many illusions were staged including the exposition of fraudulent spiritualistic manifestations then being practised by charlatans.

In 1905 the building was demolished to make room for blocks of flats and offices at 170–173 Piccadilly. Muirhead Bone captured its demise in his work The Dissolution of Egyptian Hall. The Maskelynes relocated to the St. George’s Hall in Langharn Place, which became known as Maskelyne’s Theatre.

Tags: arcana, Magic, mystery

The Regents Canal

The Regent’s Canal was built to link the Grand Junction Canal’s Paddington Arm, which opened in 1801, with the Thames at Limehouse. One of the directors of the canal company was the famous architect John Nash. Nash was friendly with the Prince Regent, later King George IV, who allowed the use of his name for the project. The Regent’s Canal Act was passed in 1812 and the company was formed to build and operate it. Nash’s assistant, James Morgan, was appointed as the canal’s Engineer. It was opened in two stages, from Paddington to Camden in 1816, and the rest of the canal in 1820.

The Regents Canal Paddington

Two serious setbacks, and shortage of money were to blame for the delay in completion. Firstly an innovative design of lock, the hydro pheumatic lock, invented by William Congreve, was built at Hampstead Road Lock. Congreve (later Sir William) was also famous for the invention of military rockets, and in the world of horology. The lock however was a failure, and in 1819 it had to be rebuilt to a conventional design.

Secondly Thomas Homer, once the canal’s promoter, embezzled its funds in 1815 causing further financial problems. To build the canal cost £772,000, twice the original estimate of expenditure. The Canal was short of water supplies and it was necessary to dam the river Brent to create a reservoir to provide them, in 1835, extended in 1837 and 1854. A number of basins were built such as Battlebridge basin where the London Canal Museum now stands, which was opened in 1822. The main centre of trade was the Regent’s Canal Dock, a point for seaborne cargo to be unloaded onto canal boats. Cargo from abroad, including ice destined for what is now the museum, was unloaded there and continued its journey on barges. City Road Basin was the second most important traffic centre, handling incoming inland freight, to a large extent.

By the 1840s the railways were taking traffic from the canals and there were attempts made, without success, to turn the canal into a railway at various times during the 19th Century. The explosion at Macclesfield Bridge (pictured in 2000) of 1874 was a famous incident in the canal’s history, in which a gunpowder barge blew up, destroying the bridge and sending debris in all directions.

In the late 1920’s talks took place between the Regent’s Canal, the Grand Junction Canal, and the Warwick Canals, resulting, in 1929, in a merger between them. The Regent’s Canal Company bought the canal assets of the other two parties and the new enlarged undertaking was renamed as the Grand Union Canal Company.

In the latter part of the second world war (1939-45) traffic increased on the canal system as an alternative to the hard pressed railways. Stop gates were installed near King’s Cross to limit flooding of the railway tunnel below, in the event that the canal was breached by German bombs. Along with other transport systems the canal was nationalised in 1948, coming under the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive, a part of the British Transport Commission, which traded under the name “British Waterways”. The British Transport Commission was split up in 1963 and the British Waterways Board , who still own and operate the canals, took over. They now also use the name British Waterways.

The last horse drawn commercial traffic was carried in 1956 following the introduction of motor tractors three years previously. By the late 1960’s commercial traffic had all but vanished. The canal has since become a leisure facility with increased use of the towpath which has been opened up to the public. Boat trips are regularly available especially between Camden and the picturesque Little Venice in west London where the canal meets the Grand Junction near Paddington.

Tags: 19th Century, Canals