Before the railways, Glasgow’s heavy traffic floated. The Forth & Clyde Canal — begun in 1768 under the great engineer John Smeaton, completed sea to sea in 1790 — crossed the country’s narrow waist from Grangemouth to Bowling, letting vessels pass between the North Sea and the Atlantic; its Glasgow branch climbed to Port Dundas, the ‘harbour on the hill’ above the city, which grew a whole industrial quarter of grain mills, distilleries and chemical works around its basins.
Its partner was pure freight: the Monkland Canal, surveyed in its first stage by none other than James Watt, was cut eastward in the 1770s and 80s expressly to pour Lanarkshire coal — and later the iron of the furnace district — cheaply into Glasgow, which it did in prodigious quantity for a century; joined to the Forth & Clyde at Port Dundas, it completed a water machine that fuelled the city’s Industrial Revolution.
The canals had their passenger romance too — swift boats skimming to Falkirk and Edinburgh behind galloping horses, night boats with cabins — but the railways took that trade in a decade, and then ground down the freight across a long century. The Monkland, derelict and lethal to swimming children, was piped and buried after the war — the M8 through the east of the city runs substantially along its filled course, one artery entombed in its successor; the Forth & Clyde closed to navigation on New Year’s Day 1963, severed by roadworks, and lay stagnant for a generation as the city’s back fence.
Then came one of regeneration’s quiet triumphs. The Millennium Link restored the Forth & Clyde end to end by 2001 — the marvellous rotating Falkirk Wheel reconnecting it to the Union Canal — and Glasgow rediscovered its waterway: Speirs Wharf’s mills became flats, Maryhill’s great lock flight and aqueduct were dusted off as heritage, and towpaths filled with cyclists where the coal scows had crawled.
The newest chapter gave the old ditch a twenty-first-century job: the ‘Smart Canal’ scheme of 2019, met on this site’s floods page, lowers the Forth & Clyde automatically before storms so it can swallow the runoff of the regenerating north city — a 1768 canal working as 2020s climate infrastructure. Smeaton, one feels, would have approved the economy of it.