page_title: Dudley Canal
section_title: Restoration
hierarchical_section_title: Dudley Canal / Restoration
caption_attribution_description: English: Dudley No 1 Canal - Earl of Dudley's Bridge In the heart of the Merry Hill Waterfront. The Earl of Dudley owned many of the mines and ironworks around the Black Country.
context_page_description: The Dudley Canal is a canal passing through Dudley in the West Midlands of England. The canal is part of the English and Welsh connected network of navigable inland waterways, and in particular forms part of the popular Stourport Ring narrowboat cruising route.
  The first short section, which connected to the Stourbridge Canal, opened in 1779, and this was connected through the Dudley Tunnel to the Birmingham Canal system in 1792. Almost immediately, work started on an extension, called Line No. 2, which ran through another long tunnel at Lapal, to reach the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. This was completed in 1798, but significant trade had to wait until the Worcester and Birmingham was completed in 1802. In 1846, the company amalgamated with the Birmingham Canal Navigations, and various improvements followed, including the Netherton Tunnel, of a similar length to the Dudley Tunnel, but much bigger, with towpaths on both sides and gas lighting. It was the last canal tunnel built in England.
  Subsidence from coal mining was a significant problem for much of the life of the canal.
context_section_description: After a period of disuse following nationalisation in 1948, the first suggestions that the canal and others should be restored were made by the newly formed Inland Waterways Protection Society (IWPS) in 1959. However, the British Transport Commission presented their annual Bill in 1961, in which the Dudley Canal and Tunnel were scheduled to be closed immediately, with no provision to safeguard the route for future restoration. Both the Inland Waterways Association and the IWPS protested, but the protests were ignored, and closure occurred in 1962.  Despite this, the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal Society explored the tunnel in mid-1963, after which a Dudley Tunnel Committee began running boat trips through it. These proved popular, and the Committee became the Dudley Canal Tunnel Preservation Society on 1 January 1964, eventually becoming the Dudley Canal Trust in 1970.
  On 26 June 1970, the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Council, a government committee created in May 1968, held a press conference at which recommendations about the future of "remainder" waterways were made to the British Waterways Board. "Remainder" was a classification that indicated there was no obvious commercial future for the waterway. The recommendations included the returning to "cruiseway" status of nine canals, which included the Dudley Canal. The Waterways Recovery Group, formed in 1970 to co-ordinate volunteer involvement in canal restoration, began work on the canal later that year, raising public awareness of the canal and its potential as an amenity. In December 1970, the Birmingham Canal Navigations Working Party produced a report, which was published in early 1971. They recommended to the British Waterways Board that much of the Birmingham Canal system should be retained. Canals were grouped into four categories, the first two of which needed little action or expenditure to make them navigable again. The Dudley Canal was in the third category, where it was suggested that the local authorities through which the canals ran should be included in restoration plans. This plan of action had formed part of the Transport Act 1968, and was adopted soon afterwards for the Dudley Tunnel Branch.
  The renamed Dudley Canal Trust began to restore the canal. Over the weekend of 26–27 September 1971, they organised "Dudley Dig and Cruise", at which over 600 people cleared a lock chamber and two lock pounds of debris. In early 1972, Dudley Corporation announced that they would provide half of the cost of restoration, and that the Park Head end of the Tunnel would be landscaped as part of a derelict land regeneration scheme. Some 50,000 tons of mud were removed from the channel by dredging, and the locks reopened later that year. The Dudley tunnel was reopened at Easter 1973, at a ceremony attended by around 14,000 visitors. A short arm north of the tunnel was restored in 1977, as part of the Black Country Museum project. Funding for this was provided by the Job Creation Scheme run by the Manpower Services Commission, as a way to provide work and training for the unemployed. The trust were able to use the museum as a base for their electrically powered trip boat, which by then had taken over 25,000 people into the tunnel since the start of trips in 1964.
  Plans for the No. 2 Line moved forwards in 1980, when a boat rally was held at Hawne Basin, a former Great Western Railway interchange, where tubes were moved from boats to trains. The railway had closed in 1967, and the basin had been unused since then, but thirty boats attended the rally, and the Combeswood Canal Trust developed plans for turning it into a marina.
  Part of the Lapal Tunnel was unearthed during the construction of the M5 motorway during the 1960s and the void was filled with concrete. The Lapal Canal Trust is working on the restoration of parts of the lost canal and to replace the tunnels with a completely new line, passing over the hill through Woodgate Valley Country Park.
  In February 2012 plans for the regeneration of the Selly Oak area were submitted to Birmingham City Council 
caption: The Earl of Dudley's Bridge crosses the canal at the Merry Hill Waterfront
exif: {}