The Grand Surrey Canal

The late 18^th century was a period when new canals, docks and bridges were being created around Britain. Ralph Dodd was a visionary with big ideas for new schemes, some of which came to fruition, although not necessarily with his ongoing involvement. He was a promoter of numerous engineering projects, with a flair for publicity and generating public interest and finance.

One of Dodd’s earliest schemes was to create a tunnel under the Thames between the busy maritime town of Gravesend and the ordnance depot at Tilbury Fort. He considered it would be of great value for troop movements and munitions across the river during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. A tunnel beneath a river had never successfully been achieved anywhere, yet finance was raised, Royal Assent was granted in 1799, and tunnelling went ahead. After several years of failure due to regular flooding, and over £15,000 of expenditure, the project was abandoned. It was to take several more decades, and much great effort by Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, before a tunnel was successfully completed below the Thames. Other ideas from Dodd in the London area were for bridges across the Thames further upriver. They were eventually completed as Vauxhall and Waterloo Bridges, but without his involvement.

In the late 1790s Dodd proposed two different canals in the North of England that were never initiated. In 1800 he gained Parliamentary approval for the Thames and Medway Canal between Gravesend and Strood. Work began but Dodd soon left the project. It was eventually completed in 1824 but was never profitable and much of it eventually became the route of a South Eastern Railway line. Dodd turned his attention to a new canal from Rotherhithe.

There had apparently been very early schemes to create canals to the south of the Thames. The earliest was possibly one reputedly dug for King Cnut in 1016 between Rotherhithe and Battersea in an attempt to take the English crown. Peter of Colechurch may have used part of this over 150 years later to temporarily divert the Thames while building his new London Bridge. A section of what is believed to have been Cnut’s Canal was discovered in 1936 during excavations at Rotherhithe.

Ralph Dodd proposed his new canal from Rotherhithe in 1799 and two years later an Act of Parliament was passed, giving the Company of Proprietors of the Grand Surrey Canal powers to raise £60,000 by issuing shares, and an additional £30,000 if required. Until the creation of the County of London in 1889 and the boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth and Wandsworth, the area south of the Thames, west from Rotherhithe, was in the County of Surrey, hence the name. The Act was for the navigation to stretch from Rotherhithe to Mitchum, and branch routes as required. There was an early proposal for it to eventually go all the way to Portsmouth on the south coast but that never materialised.

Work began in 1802. The prominent engineer John Rennie acted as a consultant. The Grand Surrey Canal linked with the Thames in the north-west of the Rotherhithe Peninsula, on the opposite side of the river from Wapping. The initial intention was for boats to enter the Grand Surrey Canal from the Thames via a lock. The waterway would then run south across the peninsula before turning west towards Camberwell. In 1809 a connection was made at New Cross Gate with the Croydon Canal, another of Dodd’s schemes, which stretched from the junction with the Grand Surrey as far south as West Croydon. (The Croydon Canal was a financial failure. It closed in 1836 and the route was sold to the London & Croydon Railway Company).

As work progressed, the shipowner John Hall proposed a 3-acre riverside basin at Rotherhithe adjacent to the Thames lock. The canal company agreed to construct it, connecting with the Grand Surrey, and thus forming an interchange known as Stave Dock in which goods could be unloaded from ships to canal barges.

By 1807 the first 3-mile section of canal had reached the Old Kent Road. A further Act of Parliament in that year allowed the company to raise a further £60,000 to fund the continuation of the navigation to Camberwell, which was completed in 1810. Another Act in 1808 allowed for a short branch to be created from Glengall Road at Peckham to a basin at Peckham town centre.

Thus far, the route had passed over flat land. To extend it any further beyond Camberwell to Mitchum, as originally planned, would have involved large expenditure to create locks to raise the canal over higher ground. In the meantime, new and more financially interesting developments were taking place on the Rotherhithe peninsula and the Grand Surrey Canal was therefore never extended further. Its final route stretched from Rotherhithe to a basin at Camberwell, and the branch into Peckham.

Long before the creation of the Grand Surrey Canal, in 1696 a dock known as the Howland Wet Dock had been created on the eastern side of the Rotherhithe Peninsula. By the second half of the 18^th century it was used by whaling ships and renamed the Greenland Dock.

In 1806 the Commercial Dock Company was formed. It acquired the Greenland Dock and created a network of new docks for ships bringing timber to London, as well as timber ponds where timber could be floated. Other companies also created new basins, until the Rotherhithe peninsula was a network of docks and timber ponds.

In 1855 the canal company was renamed the Grand Surrey Docks & Canal Company and opened its own Albion Dock and timber ponds at Rotherhithe. It replaced Stave Dock with a new entrance lock slightly to the west, which linked into their new Surrey Basin. From there ships could pass into Albion Dock.

In 1865 the Grand Surrey and the Commercial Dock companies merged to form the Surrey Commercial Dock Company and embarked on a programme of linking the numerous basins at Rotherhithe. In 1905 Greenland Dock was extended, cutting across the Grand Surrey Canal. Thereafter the connection between the Thames and the canal was through the Greenland Dock entrance, with the canal shortened by about a mile.

The Grand Surrey Canal was never particularly profitable, with only moderate dividends paid to investors. By the late 19^th century its route had been crossed by various railway bridges. Most of England’s canals had to compete with the growth of the railway network, which could transport goods more speedily over long distances. Yet, as with the Regent’s Canal to the north of London, the railways were not a particular threat to the more local business of the Grand Surrey.

In 1909 the Surrey Commercial Docks, along with the Grand Surrey Canal was nationalised under the Port of London Authority and renamed the Surrey Canal. Its heyday was in the early 20^th century. By then it was lined with factories, warehouses, as well as coal, iron and builders’ yards, with materials and finished goods transported by barge. Timber was brought from the Surrey Commercial Docks to yards along the canal’s length. The South Metropolitan Gas Company operated its own fleet of tugs and barges to supply coal to its gasworks on the Old Kent Road. Factories along the canal produced leather goods, lemonade, glassware and gramophones. There were four toll houses along the canal to collect fees from passing boats.

Road improvements after the Second World War allowed factories and other businesses to be located away from canals and railways. Traffic on the Grand Surrey decreased sharply from 1945, and during the 1950s it became dilapidated. By 1960 the Camberwell section had been filled in and Camberwell Basin used to form Burgess Park. In the 1970s timber was no longer being brought into the Surrey Commercial Docks. The remainder of the canal became obsolete and was filled in during that decade.

Since closure, parts of the canal have been built over. There are quite long stretches, however, where it is still easy to follow its route. Surrey Basin is now an ornamental pond called Surrey Water, and its former Thames lock can still be seen. On the south side of Greenland Dock there is now a slipway into the dock beside the sports centre, at the point where the canal previously entered the extended dock. To the south of Greenland Dock the street Grand Canal Avenue follows the route, as does Surrey Canal Road to the west of Deptford Park. The last part of the main line to Camberwell is now a footpath through Burgess Park. From Glengall Road, at the eastern end of Burgess Park, the former Peckham Branch is now a linear park running south into Peckham. Various bridges that once passed over the canal still survive to carry railways and roads.

But what of Ralph Dodd? As with almost every one of the projects he initiated, his involvement in the Grand Surrey Canal was short-lived. After securing the Acts of Parliament for the Surrey and Croydon canals he fell out of favour with the other investors and in 1801 was paid off.

During the early 1820s advances were being made in the development of steam-driven paddle steamers. In December 1821 Dodd was aboard the paddle steamer Sovereign during its trial run at Gloucester on the River Severn. The boiler exploded and such was the extensive damage that the vessel was broken up. Dodd was badly injured during the disaster. Almost penniless by then, he was forced to walk the lengthy distance to Cheltenham to seek medical assistance. He died there the following April.