ABSTRACT
The initiation, in the middle of the eighteenth century, of the British Canal Era was primarily due, not to any examples in canal construction already offered by the ancients, by the Chinese and other Eastern nations, or by Continental countries, but to a natural transition from certain forms of river improvement already carried out in England. In 1755 the Corporation of Liverpool and a number of merchants of that port obtained Parliamentary powers to deepen three streams flowing from the St. Helens coal fields and combining to form the Sankey Brook, which drains into the Mersey at a point two miles below Warrington. The Act passed in 1720 for the navigation of the Douglas had allowed of coal from the pits at Wigan being taken down that river to the Ribble estuary, and then along the coast to the Mersey estuary, and so on to Liverpool.
