GREAT WIDE HOPE

摘要

In the 1990s, a hand-painted sign went up at Fenny Stratford Lock announcing the Bedford & Milton Keynes Waterway Trust's 'Target opening 2010'. Ah, the robust optimism! The turn of the millennium was a golden age for waterways. A large amount of funding was available for restoration, with the Scottish and Pennine waterways on course for reopening, and restoration gathering pace over the south. In the flush of optimism, ten years seemed an achievable goal for nearly all waterway projects. The Bedford-Milton Keynes link has long been the 'great wide hope' for canal boaters, the only realistic chance of broad-beam boats reaching the north by inland waters. First proposed when the Grand Union Canal opened around 1811 (and many times thereafter), the concept was finally resurrected in 1996 when the Bedford & Milton Keynes Waterway Trust was launched. In 2010 the trust formed a consortium with the three local councils in the area, along with British Waterways (now the Canal & River Trust), the Marston Vale Trust (the community forest that now owns much of the land in the central section) and others. Working together, they arranged to have the corridor protected in planning and devised a route through it.