Today, I had a couple of meetings near Manchester,
and I had a bit of spare time, so I visited three river crossings,
all a bit strange, and all with something in common.
Although, I guess technically these are canal crossings.
But some of the canal is a diverted river.
So... I went with river crossings, it sounds better.
My first stop was the Hulmes Ferry, and I took my GoPro and my drone with me.
Like all the three crossings, the Hulmes Ferry goes over the Manchester Ship Canal.
That canal runs for nearly 60 kilometres,
starting in the Mersey Estuary in the Irish Sea near Liverpool,
and running through to Manchester.
It's more than a century old.
The canal is a massive engineering achievement.
But it's not like the builders just smashed through anything that was in their way.
It was the Industrial Revolution, but still.
The Act of Parliament that gave permission for the canal, back in 1885,
included a lot of requirements to make sure all the landowners along the route were...
well, if not happy, at least satisfied.
Embankments or channels had to be maintained or built,
access had to be provided, fees had to be paid.
300 pages of technical legal details,
some of which still apply to this day.
Also, you'd think that by now,
every bit of UK law would be online and freely available,
but no, I found most of this
in archived Freedom of Information on obscure things from years ago.
Anyway. One of those legal requirements from 1885 is a ferry,
"by night and by day whenever required",
to replace a low bridge they had to knock down.
If I'm being honest, there's not really much need to have a ferry like that
in the 21st century. You wouldn't start a new ferry service there today.
Yes, it was useful in the past,
it's an hour's walk to get to the other side...
but unless you happen to live really close to one side
and work really close to the other,
it's not much use.
For almost every practical purpose, it's quicker to drive.
There are regular passengers: so the ferry driver said
in an interview a couple of years ago, but not many.
It's mostly walkers and cyclists out for the fun of it.
But my travel on it was logged,
one more on the count of "people who actually use this ferry".
And I'll get back to why that happened later.
A few kilometres west was my second stop, the Thelwall Ferry.
Actually, it might be "Tell-wall". I didn’t meet anyone to ask,
and there’s no official web site or information about it,
but it’s much the same arrangement,
although this time with a small charge.
Eleven pence.
Oh, and that boat doesn't have an engine,
it's just powered by a hard-working man rowing you across, just as there's been
for more than 120 years.
Not the same man, obviously,
and not the same boat either.
And when I turned up, there was a small sign in the window of the ferryman's cottage,
saying that the service was suspended due to low water levels in the canal.
I'll be honest, those water levels looked fine to me, but I'm not the expert.
Low water levels aside, the ferry continues,
because the law says that “the Company shall work the said ferry whenever required”.
The Company, by the way, is called the Peel Group these days,
after a lot of buying and selling and corporate renaming and mergers.
They're an enormous property investment firm who own the entire Manchester Ship Canal
along with what seems like every major bit of land and private infrastructure around Manchester.
I've reached out to them with interview requests before for other stuff,
and they've always turned me down,
so for this video I have to rely on secondary sources,
newspaper articles and quotes. I don't like doing that,
but from the look of some of those articles,
it's not just me that they've turn down requests from.
Which is fair, they're absolutely within their rights to do that.
And, if I'm honest, the second reason that I'm sorta-improvising here and relying
on those quotes and articles...
I only found out I was travelling to Manchester yesterday morning!
So I had to spend the entire rest of the day just researching at home
trying to get the law right.
So: the Thelwall Ferry. Or Tell-wall.
About 600 crossings a year, they say:
some days there's barely anyone, other days a whole walking club might turn up
and want to go across at eleven pence each.
The third crossing, inbetween those two ferries, is the Warburton Toll Bridge.
Which is a deeply frustrating bridge for a lot of people,
because the toll to cross in a car
is twelve pence.
Or 25 pence, if you want a day pass.
And there is often a queue. Cash only, no change given.
And it seems almost farcical to have a toll collector,
and a barrier, and sometimes very long queues...
for twelve pence a time.
Except: when I got there and I drove up…
No charges! But, wanting to get the shot, I turned round and went back over,
and they were charging that way,
but no day passes either. Just a man with a coin bucket and no change.
Uh... no daily ticket?
That's 20p then! Thank you.
[Toll operator] "Right, cheers pal."
One of the nice things about improvising this video is
that I’ve seen things as they actually were,
not as the PR teams would want them to be.
Anyway, this toll. It made sense when the bridge was built.
"For every Carriage drawn or propelled by Steam or any Means other than Animal Power,
"Two Shillings and Sixpence".
Back then, that was worth collecting, adjusted for inflation,
that'd be about £15.
But the law did not mention inflation.
The company could choose to waive the tolls at any time,
they did that during the Covid lockdown last year,
and I guess they're doing that one way now.
But if you stop collecting tolls for the long term,
it's a lot more difficult to bring them back.
And they'd still be required to maintain the bridge.
If there's one car in each direction every 30 seconds on average,
and looking at that, yeah, there is:
well, that's still about a quarter million pounds of revenue every year.
So you'll see people talk about story of old quirky British laws
that mean you still have these ferries, and you still that toll bridge,
oh, and they must be maintained by law,
and isn't it weird what happens in rural Britain?
But I don't think the law is the reason those crossings are still there.
Because there are two ways you could interpret "whenever required"
in those old legal documents. "Whenever required" could mean:
whenever anyone asks for it.
If someone turns up, any hour of any day, the ferry must be there waiting for them.
It's a valid interpretation, but that's not how those words been read through history.
And it's not how they're being read now.
The Hulmes ferry only runs for a few hours, three or four days a week,
and never in winter.
And it stopped running for a year back in 2010,
it took a campaign and local effort to get it reinstated.
As for the Thelwall Ferry, it runs most days,
but only for a few hours.
And apparently not when the water’s low?
Remember I said my crossing was logged and counted?
Well, you can also interpret "whenever required" to mean
"if there is reasonable demand".
There's an unofficial web site for the Hulmes ferry, and it says:
"use it or lose it".
Those old laws mention other ferries. They've all gone.
I don't know if they were removed through legal process or just
forgotten about, because ultimately: no-one's complaining.
And if someone did complain, who in government is going to take action
about a ferry that almost no-one uses?
I think these ferries, and the 12 pence toll,
have stuck around because it would be more effort
for the giant corporation to try and stop them.
It's a minor thing for a multi-billion-pound company
to pay for a couple of ferry-boats,
compared to having to deal with angry locals and bad press.
And I think the toll on that bridge has stayed at 12 pence for so long
because increasing it would have required a change in the law,
and trying to get that is way more time-consuming and expensive
than just keeping things as they are. In our own lives,
we all make do with a lot of small bothersome things and irritations
because it's less work than trying to fix them.
Different scale, same principle.
Although I'm not saying the ferries are a bothersome thing,
I think they're brilliant,
I think we should have more quirky useful things funded
by multi-billion-dollar corporations.
I'm just saying that the company has many bigger things to deal with.
If they wanted to, they could probably get away without the ferries.
And at a guess… I reckon it's not worth the hassle of not running them.
But one thing is changing soon.
That bridge needs expensive refurbishment, maybe even replacement soon.
Which means that the company has noticed it, and suddenly
changing the law might be worth their time.
There was a consultation process for the locals last month.
The company would like to raise the toll up to a whole...
...one pound.
And replace the ticket booths with automatic systems.
So if you do want the novelty of the 12 pence toll...
now's the time to go.
Because the law will probably change quite soon.
As for the ferries... I do hope that the locals will make sure that
removing them never becomes the easy option.