Langstone to Portsmouth, without going to sea?

Langstone to Chi....is easily done...needs...neapish tide and timing...I have got through in a 35' wooden cabin cruiser some years ago!! Again you have to hang about to get air draught in the pool one side of the bridge or the other...and..if not local...do a land recce first.
 
Elessar said:
I read somewhere that it used to be possible to go London-Portsmouth by boat without going to sea - to get the wages to the sailors without risk from the French.
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Hmm...interesting idea, but...why couldn't the sailors' payment be transported from London to Portsmouth by road?
 
Ah...in those days the supplies for the fleet were brought by that route to avoid the sea route...but once in Langstone they went down the harbour and entered a canal in Eastney Lake...in fact still called Milton Locks.[home of LHFA...a local boating club]This canal went across the lower part of Portsmouth to the Dockyard ,and the railway line between Fratton ...and Portsmouth and Southsea Stations runs in a cutting......that actually was part of the canal.The road adjacent still called Canal Walk [PO1]
The Arun was connected to Chi. by canal from somewhere between Ford and Arundel...not sure of the exact route...but came out in Chi next to the Premier Marina there...
 
In those days you could carry much more weight and bulk of cargo by water...as indeed nowadays!! I think it was more munitions etc than pay!!
 
looked it all up on wiki just now...at one time a steam vessel lugged 6 x 40 ton barges through this route...sometimes carrying gold and silver to London...for the Bank of England..the whole enterprise was not overly successful...and it was Ford to Chi.
 
Dan,

actually this route, which included Chichester canal linked to the UK canal network, was designed to get supplies - not least ammo', there was an ammo wharf at Guildford - to Portsmouths' ( sailing ) warships without going offshore risking being knobbled by the French.

It was a great idea, but by the time it was built the French weren't so frisky, and we had steamships to haul stuff around the coast, so it never really caught on.

The Chichester Canal has recently been restored a bit, offering trips to and from the city centre a few miles out, with rowing and I think canoes and low power mobo's for hire.

What I'd really like to see is the stretch to and along Chichester Marina including the lock gates to the harbour by Birdham restored !
 
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Dan,

I suspect we have discussed this before ?!

I know the bridge snags facing the Chichester Canal, but I was at Dunsfold aerodrome in the 80's when the Wey and Arun Canal Trust started restoring the Wey and Arun Canal, a bit of which runs alongside the airfield, so my job was photographing their progress there - including all the wartime aircraft wreckage and ordnance they pulled out; in war anything not immediately useful went into the canal.

It seemed impossible they would ever restore much of the canal then, there were loads of obstacles like houses built over the canal, NIMBY politicians etc.

Skip to last year, my girlfriend and I had a very pleasant jolly from Loxwood on one of their barges, they have done brilliantly including a lot of new serious engineering.

When I asked one of their guys about their ambitious plans, the answer was " we've got the odd idiot rock star in the way, but that's OK we've got permission to go around them " - yes, dig new short canal stretches ( 'pounds' ) !!!

From what I've seen, it's not a question of if this will happen, just when.

The Chichester Canal may have snags with the low bridges right now, but nobody ( that I know of anyway ) knows quite what the new bypass may consist of, with enlightened, tourism aware planning who knows, but I'd be willing to bet a fiver that before you croak the link to the sea will be restored...

http://www.weyandarun.co.uk/
 
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Seajet said:
I suspect we have discussed this before ?! I'd be willing to bet a fiver that before you croak the link to the sea will be restored...
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Quite right, we discussed it late last year. My memory...:rolleyes: I certainly hope you're right about Birdham-Chichester opening up again. I'm sure the canal would literally wave a flag of tourist-appeal, if sails could be seen over hedgerows, making their way across fields, miles from the sea. Sails aside, doubtless the city of Chichester would benefit if harbour-visitors could row or motor right up to Southgate Basin.
 
dancrane said:
Quite right, we discussed it late last year. My memory...:rolleyes: I certainly hope you're right about Birdham-Chichester opening up again. I'm sure the canal would literally wave a flag of tourist-appeal, if sails could be seen over hedgerows, making their way across fields, miles from the sea. Sails aside, doubtless the city of Chichester would benefit if harbour-visitors could row or motor right up to Southgate Basin.
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Dan,

I've only just this evening managed to fight past the new forum and actually posted a few pics earlier on this thread, but when I tried the same and every alternative I can come up with to post a pic of a sailing barge on Chichester Canal, no chance, seems you'll just have to imagine it !

My girlfriend is looking to move houses and we checked out a place just South of Chichester; though it wasn't mentioned in the blurb I found it backed right onto the restored part of the canal, with canoes and small boats trundling around, I could quite imagine having something like a Laser or hopefully more boaty thing there.

OK the house could have been better but was pretty nice - unfortunately Anne saw through me in an instant !

Oh well, back to watching things on TV about cops and spies in Miami working or living on houseboats then.

When I win the lottery it will be a boatyard in Cornwall with the stone house next door...

Out now, g'night and thanks chum.
 
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Elessar said:
I read somewhere that it used to be possible to go London-Portsmouth by boat without going to sea - to get the wages to the sailors without risk form the French.

So Thames, Wey, Arun, it's how you get from the arun to chichester I'm not sure of. Then its chichester canal, and then the route this thread is about.

Anyone fill in the gap?
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Not quite the route this thread is about - Portsea Creek is a fairly modern phenomenon - I think the route to Portsmouth in those days was via canal at Milton at the southern end of Langstone Harbour (by Locks SC who are named after the canal end) ....

These are pretty good:

http://www.welcometoportsmouth.co.uk/portsmouth arundel canal.html
http://wikimapia.org/1257206/Milton-Locks

I have a book somewhere that described all the problems they had building it.. and I don't think it was ever used in anger...
 
I was down at Langstone Sailing Club today and took a stroll around the northern end of the road bridge at low water taking some video of both the bridge and the "small" channel on the western side showing the tide running from east to west. Will try and post up on YT later and pop a link here for all to see if interested. Also a vid of the channel between Northney and the bridge at low water.
 
Seajet said:
Dan,

I suspect we have discussed this before ?!

I know the bridge snags facing the Chichester Canal, but I was at Dunsfold aerodrome in the 80's when the Wey and Arun Canal Trust started restoring the Wey and Arun Canal, a bit of which runs alongside the airfield, so my job was photographing their progress there - including all the wartime aircraft wreckage and ordnance they pulled out; in war anything not immediately useful went into the canal.

It seemed impossible they would ever restore much of the canal then, there were loads of obstacles like houses built over the canal, NIMBY politicians etc.

Skip to last year, my girlfriend and I had a very pleasant jolly from Loxwood on one of their barges, they have done brilliantly including a lot of new serious engineering.

When I asked one of their guys about their ambitious plans, the answer was " we've got the odd idiot rock star in the way, but that's OK we've got permission to go around them " - yes, dig new short canal stretches ( 'pounds' ) !!!

From what I've seen, it's not a question of if this will happen, just when.

The Chichester Canal may have snags with the low bridges right now, but nobody ( that I know of anyway ) knows quite what the new bypass may consist of, with enlightened, tourism aware planning who knows, but I'd be willing to bet a fiver that before you croak the link to the sea will be restored...

http://www.weyandarun.co.uk/
Click to expand...

Seajet, you may find this slightly strange, but my wife and I were listening to that conversation about the "rock star"! We must have been standing next to you. I must get a forum burgee and wear the damn thing, I only met Cardo 'cos he was flying his. It was a grand day, we decided to walk alongside the canal and I helped "do" one of the locks. Wierd.
 
Haven't-a-Clue said:
Seajet, you may find this slightly strange, but my wife and I were listening to that conversation about the "rock star"! We must have been standing next to you. I must get a forum burgee and wear the damn thing, I only met Cardo 'cos he was flying his. It was a grand day, we decided to walk alongside the canal and I helped "do" one of the locks. Wierd.
Click to expand...

Hi Haven't -a-Clue,

well great minds think alike !

I'm so impressed by the works done; in the stretch by Dunsfold Aerodrome they found it full of aircraft bits and bombs; in WWII the place was for a while used by the Dutch flying B-25 Mitchells, one had a ' hang up ' one day, a bomb set to release which didn't drop.

The pilot gave the crew the chance to bail out but they said ' we'll stay with you Skipper ' - on touchdown the thing blew up killing them all.

The wreckage went into the canal then, until about 1986 when they dredged it up; a skilled fitter made tiny model Mitchells out of the bits and sold them, but I didn't want a bit of something people had died in.

That bit of canal was full of unexploded ordnance, when this started coming up the singlehanded bloke with a JCB on a raft doing the dredging started asking awkward questions; in typical late BAe fashion they made him sign a form, ' if I get blown up it's nobody elses fault ' !

Wish we'd both had forum burgees on that barge trip, maybe next time.

Andy
 
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