This thread was originally written and published in April 2018.

This morning I traced the routes of four canals that were proposed in the early 19th century to bridge the gap between Edinburgh and the newly constructed Leith Docks. John Rennie the Elder’s route is shown in yellow, Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson proposed two options in light blue and Hugh Baird’s extension to the as-yet unbuilt Union Canal is in red. That latter itself is in blue. John Rennie the Elder was a noted engineer of canals and bridges and Hugh Baird was the Union Canal’s engineer. These routes were all traced off of Kirkwood’s Town Plan of 1817, which you can view for yourself here on the National Library of Scotland’s excellent maps website.

Stevenson proposed both a route down the Dean Gorge and, like Baird and Rennie, another down a series of locks parallel to Easter Road. Baird and Stevenson both proposed routes through what is now Princes St. Gardens, which at the time was still the boggy remains of the Nor’ Loch.

Such was the expectation that the canal would come through, that the legend says a street was even pre-emptively named in its honour – of course that is a backwards derivation. This street had been proposed under that name since the formative days of the New Town 1770s and a plan for an ornamental (not navigable) canal in the Nor’ Loch valley had been proposed as early as 1723.

But none of these plans ever came to fruition; Railway mania would soon come to Town and Edinburgh’s challenging topography resulted in no canal beyond Fountainbridge, but a very dry railway station called Canal Street! This was the southern terminus in the city of the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven railway which reached here through the Scotland Street Tunnel.

Apart from Stevenson’s Dean Gorge proposal, each route was constrained by geography to passing around the south and to the east of the obstacle of Calton Hill and then running down the line of Easter Road in a series of locks. Easter Road at this time was not the dense neighbourhood of tenements that it is now, it ran largely through fields and market gardens, with only a handful of houses scattered along it, as we can see in the contemporary pastoral scene below.

So why did Stevenson propose two routes for his canal?

It was all about cost. When this report was published in 1817, between Edinburgh and Leith stood a lot of new and expensive property, most of it owned by the kind of people who wouldn’t simply roll over for a canal. Stevenson’s survey found a drop of 158 feet along the line that his canal would follow to the prospective sea lock into the Leith Docks basin. This could realistically overcome by 14 locks each of 12 feet 2 inches drop. But there were really only two basic routes available due to the city’s development; you have to either skirt around the south and east side of the New Town or go around the north and west of it. Hence, Stevenson’s two different lines, one for each option. A tunnel had been considered through Calton Hill to avoid going around its eastern edge but he had estimated it would be cheaper to simply buy up and demolish any property in the way and accept the slightly longer route.

You don’t need to take my word for it, here are the great man’s own:

Through Prince’s (the old spelling) St. Gardens, Stevenson proposed two options; one which would have re-flooded the western Nor’ Loch into a basin (“lake”) and the other which would have formed an ornamental basin to the east where Waverley Station now stands.

Stevenson, ever the practical man, appeals to the vanity and wallets of the New Town riche by implying his canal will bring them beauty and unearned wealth. Note that the Union Canal would not arrive in the city until 5 years later, in May 1822, and Stevenson was intending to reach the 1790 Forth & Clyde Canal at Falkirk by way of a level contour canal along the Almond Valley – a different route to that of the Union Canal. He also proposed that he could avoid the 14 locks of the Forth & Clyde entirely if his canal were to be extended all the way to Glasgow following a new own contour route of his own. It would be, in his own words, “a JUNCTION CANAL of the greatest commercial importance to this part of the Kingdom.” A canal this grand and important needs a grand and important name, so he proposed the “EDINBURGH AND GLASGOW GRAND JUNCTION CANAL“.

But Stevenson was also dreaming big here. He envisaged that his new route would be the the primary highway between Glasgow and Edinburgh and there would be other canals radiating off at either end into East Lothian, Ayrshire etc. A whole network of waterways crossing the industrious and agricultural Central Belt of Scotland. The future he foresaw also mentioned the prospect of “lateral (canal) cuts and “rail-roads“, branching off the canal to take it nearer to coal workings, which were expected to be the primary revenue. What he could not foresee was that it was the latter form of transport that would triumph, not his proposals. But this was how most engineers were thinking at the time. These horse-drawn rail-roads were to be a cheap and quick ways to connect coal mines to more efficient, long-distance methods of transport. i.e. canals and ultimately ships.

Next we tackled the prospect of carrying passengers on his canal and propose some solutions to entice them to journey through its tunnels. Various schemes for lights in the tunnel or on the boats are described, lights and awnings would make the boats “both cheerful and comfortable“. Or better yet, why not make it a night time sleeper service – one could go to bed in Glasgow and wake up refreshed in Edinburgh!

You have to hand it to Stevenson, he really was quite a visionary. Having dealt with making his boats comfortable and attractive to passengers, he also proposed how they might be propelled by steam, based largely on a picture of one he had seen “in the hands of a gentleman“):

Anyway, back to coal. The early history of canals and railways in Edinburgh was largely about getting coal into the city. The price of the vital fuel in the city was inflated by the costs of either carting it from the Lothians coalfield or brining it by sea from Fife, Clackmannanshire or northeast England. So it was key to Stevenson’s scheme that the Leith branch must be built to bring the coal arriving by sea directly into the city. Edinburgh and Leith formed a large and growing metropolis and required about 7.5 tons of coal per family per annum indeed!

But you can’t eat coal. People also need food – so of course Stevenson had thought about that too. His canal would bring you potatoes. And turnips. And et cetera. All the potatoes and turnips and et cetera you could eat!

This wasn’t just a plan for a canal; it was a plan for a complete re-imagination of the supply and distribution system of all of central Scotland; a prospectus for a prosperous future. There was no reason that Stevenson could see why his canal should not promote commerce wherever it went and why anyone who were to invest in it should not become fabulously wealthy in the process. Indeed, so profitable and industrious would it be between Edinburgh and Leith alone that he is already considering widening it before he has even finished writing his initial proposal!

I skim read the whole document hoping for more details on the route through central Edinburgh, so was disappointed that it really doesn’t provide any more than you can conclude from looking at the map. This was a high-level proposal, not a detailed scheme. If you got this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something about the pre-Victorian Scottish canal utopia that never was.

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