In 1790 there was a proposal for a waterway to link Manchester with Bolton and Bury. In fact the canal was to start at the River Irwell in Salford. One of the land owners, Matthew Fletcher, was the original technical adviser and he was a mining engineer and coal mine owner. The Bill received its royal assent on 13 May 1791.
The canal was opened in 1797 from Bolton and Bury to the Oldfield Road terminus and extended down five locks to the River Irwell in 1808. Originally the canal was built with narrow locks but during construction the locks were altered into broad locks when there was a proposal to link the navigation to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Wigan Top Lock which was still being built. The scheme was known as the Red Moss extension. There were also other extension schemes to link the canal at Bury to Sladen (via Rochdale) and across the hills to Church (via Haslingden). None of these schemes was ever begun.
Coal carrying was one of the main reasons for building the canal. A lot of the mines were situated very close to the waterway so that loading was direct from pit head to boat. Lime, limestone, manure, stone, sand and slate were also carried on the canal. Prior to the construction of the railway between Bolton and Manchester passengers and parcels were carried on the packet boats. Later timber was carried in boats and by floating it on the water. Night soil was loaded onto boats from carts at Frederick Road Bridge in Salford and was shovelled through doors in the bridge parapets into the boat below. Unlike the tradition on most other canals the boatmen did not live on the boats; they lived “on the bank”.
1830 there was a proposal to convert the canal into a railway. In 1831 at the first general meeting of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Navigation and Railway Company, the line of the proposed railway was changed in order to retain the canal. In 1838, forty years after their introduction, the packet boats were sold as they were proving to be uneconomical and their speed damaged the canal banks. By 1838 the company completed the railway and commenced passenger trains between Manchester and Bolton. In 1846 the Company was taken over by the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company, and the name of the company was changed in 1847 to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company.
The Bolton arm went out of use in 1924, and in 1936 there were two serious breaches of the canal bank, notably at Little Lever, and navigation was restricted to a 4 mile length from Bury to Ladyshore and a 3 mile length from Salford to Clifton. In the immediate post war period, like most canals in this country, the remains of the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal were nationalised. In 1955 the canal was described as “a waterway having insufficient commercial prospects to justify their retention for navigation”. The rest of the canal was abandoned in 1961 but some traffic continued in Bury until 1966. Parts of the canal have been filled in over the years and sections have been sold to a variety of owners.
