LAPAL LOOKING UP

摘要

Canal restorers often tend to be an optimistic bunch, and some would say that's because they need to be. To look at the remains of a long-derelict waterway, blocked by new roads and factories, with demolished bridges, collapsed tunnels and missing aqueducts, and then to pronounce that there are "no insuperable obstacles to full reopening" takes a bit of a 'glass half full' type of attitude.But time and again, that optimistic view has been justified, as 'impossible' restorations such as the Huddersfield and Rochdale canals have been completed and reopened, while others such as the Wey & Arun and Cotswold Canals, continue to make good progress in the face of seriouschallenges. However, when it comes to the Lapal Canal, even an optimistic canal restorer like myself used to regard it as something of a long shot. Over two miles of its length consists of Lapal Tunnel, whose collapse in 1917 shut the canal as a through route, and whose structure is felt to be damaged beyond repair by mining -and possibly by the M5 being built across the top of it in the 1960s. And the lengths either side of the tunnel haven't fared too well either, with the eastern end, near where it met the Worcester & Birmingham Canal at Selly Oak, having disappeared under a contaminated ex-industrial site known as the Battery Park. So it wasn't like you could easily open up even the first few hundred yards as a step in the right direction. What hope for it, then?