Grand Union Canal Walk

The Grand Union Canal runs from London to Birmingham and the Grand Union Canal walk, essentially along the towpath, is 137 miles long. Although we like canals, when it comes to walking along the towpath, we feel it is best done in small doses - so we initially had no intention of walking the whole path. However, having realised that we had already walked a lot of the Grand Union Canal Walk in the Milton Keynes area and thus how good it is at linking other paths (including the Ridgeway, the Two Ridges Link, the Greensand Ridge Walk, the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk and the Ouse Valley Way, we decided in autumn 2017 to make a deliberate attempt to complete the whole section through Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes. In practice, we therefore aimed to walk from Tring Station (just in Hertfordshire and on the Ridgeway) to the the Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne (Northamptonshire). We completed this task in early February 2018, having thoroughly enjoyed our short walks along the canal on winter Sunday afternoons. It was a wet winter and spring, and even the towpath was muddy in places; we didn't like to think what ordinary footpaths would be like, so we decided to walk few more legs along the canal, and by summer 2018 we had walked from Tring, through Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire and over the county boundary into Warwickshire, reaching Lower Shuckburgh.

Then, in January 2019, we bought a flat in the village of Simpson, Milton Keynes, for me to use when in the area for work - and Richard stays here too quite regularly. The flat is just a few steps away from the Grand Union Canal, by the Plough pub, which we first walked past when walking between Water Eaton and Woughton Park. I walk along the canal most days on my much valued walk to work, often with a heron, swans or ducks for company, and I feel an increased understanding for those who live on the canal. All in all, it feels quite a special place, so we decided to complete the walk along its entire length. This wasn't entirely straightforward; the northern sections are too far to travel for the day from either Norfolk or Milton Keynes, but we managed to progress from Lower Shuckburgh to Kingswood Junction (thereby joining up with the Heart of England Way) in a rather muddy couple of days of walking in February 2020. Meanwhile, by making use of trains on the Milton Keynes to London line, we edged further south to Watford.  Then came Covid-19, meaning that overnight stays and the use of public transport were off limits, so our progress on the Grand Union Canal Walk was paused for what turned out to be nearly three years. We returned to the canal in  early 2023 and as of January 2024, we have at last reached the London end at the River Thames. 

We'd explored parts of the Grand Union Canal before. In London, the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal links to the Regent's Canal, which I have explored with my friends Penny and Pam, and I have visited Birmingham's Gas Street Basin when at a conference. Between the two, Richard and I walked past the famous Hatton Locks on a perishing cold February in 2006 when Helen was on a pre-University visit to Warwick University. She didn't go to Warwick as an undergraduate, but she did do her PhD there and work there for a while, and we returned to Hatton Locks when she and Tom were living in nearby Kenilworth. We visited Foxton Locks on the Leicester Line of the Canal back in 1995, whilst at a reunion with our friends from undergraduate days in Durham, and their children.

For most of the way, the route of the walk along the canal is quite obvious: you follow the towpath! (though where there are towpaths on both banks it sometimes matters which side you are on, e.g. to avoid entrances to marinas and arms of the canal that you can't cross, or to allow access to a car park or station). There are occasional "Grand Union Canal Walk" signs, but not very many of them. We usually carry a paper Ordnance Survey Explorer Series map on our walks, which has been useful in getting a feel for the landscape through which the canal passes - and I have the OS maps app on my phone too. Early on in our adventures along the canal we bought a second hand copy of the 1993 Aurum guide "The Grand Union Canal Walk" by Anthony Burton and Neil Curtis. It was amusingly out of date  on occasion, especially where sections that were industrial or down at heal have now become trendy; and occasionally what were landmarks (e.g. the Nestle Factory in Hayes) have disappeared or been developed to such an extent that their original purpose is not immediately obvious. However, the guidebook provided useful background information and history. 

As the name implies, the Grand Union Canal was not created by the building of a single canal, but rather the amalgamation of several canals into a single continuous route from the Thames at Brentford to the centre of Birmingham, with "arms" heading to - amongst other places - Paddington, Leicester and Northampton. The southern part of the Grand Union Canal, from the Thames to Braunston (where it joins with the Oxford Canal) was built as the Grand Junction Canal mostly in the late 18th Century, It includes some impressive engineering achievements, including flights of locks, tunnels including the 2.8 km Blisworth tunnel, and the iron aquaduct, built to take the canal over the River Great Ouse. 

It's important to remember that although much of the current use of the UK's canal network is recreational and most of the people who live on boats on the canal don't particularly need to be there, the canals were essentially built to transport goods. The boats were originally horse-drawn, sometimes with separate tunnels for the horses alongside the main tunnel, through which the boats would have been propelled by leg-work, and bridges designed so that the horses could pass from one side of the canal to the other while still yoked to the boat.  However as recently as the second world war, the Grand Union Canal would have been busy with boats and butties taking coal from Birmingham to London.: I'd recommend Emma Smith's book "Maidens' Trip" for more about this.  Up until about the same time, the canal supported a large community of workers and their families.