Grosvenor Canal

Grosvenor Canal
The view from the entrance lock towards the River Thames
Specifications
Status	Closed, mostly infilled
History
Date of first use	1824
Date completed	1825
Date closed	1858, 1925, 1990s
Geography
Connects to	River Thames

Grosvenor Canal was a canal in the Pimlico area of London, opened in 1824. It was progressively shortened, as first the railways to Victoria Station and then the Ebury Bridge housing estate were built over it. It remained in use until 1995, enabling barges to be loaded with refuse for removal from the city, making it the last canal in London to operate commercially. A small part of it remains among the Grosvenor Waterside development.

In the early eighteenth century, there were marshes and a tidal creek on the north bank of the Thames near Pimlico. The Chelsea Waterworks Company obtained an Act of Parliament in 1722; they were authorised to take water from the Thames via one of more "Cutt or Cutts". These fed the water into the marshes, and a tide mill was used to pump the water to reservoirs at Hyde Park and St James's Park as the tide ebbed. The reservoirs supplied west London with drinking water. The land between the river and the later site of Victoria Station was owned by Sir Richard Grosvenor, who leased it to the company in 1724. They enlarged the existing creek and built the tide mill, which continued to work until 1775, after which the pumping was performed by a steam engine.

The company were able to take water directly from the Thames following the granting of another Act of Parliament in 1809. They continued to lease the land until 1823, when the lease expired. In the following year, the Earl of Grosvenor then decided to turn the creek into a canal, building a lock near the junction with the Thames and a basin at the upper end, around 0.75 miles (1.21 km) inland. Most of the commercial traffic appears to have been coal, to supply the neighbourhood. The resident engineer for the construction of the tidal lock and upper basin was John Armstrong, originally from Ingram in Northumberland. Having trained as a millwright in Newcastle, he worked on a number of bridge projects under several of the major civil engineers of the time, including Thomas Telford, William Jessop and John Rennie, before taking on the Grosvenor Canal project. It was one of the few times he worked independently as a civil engineer. The canal opened in 1824, and Chelsea Waterworks continued to extract water from it, until the passing of the Metropolis Water Act in 1852, which prohibited extraction from the Thames below Teddington Lock. They moved to Seething Wells, Surbiton in 1856.