Canals get £1.3m of extra drought-proofing work this winter after two dry summers

England's canals are getting an extra £1.3m of work this winter to help them cope with drought, after two dry summers in a row left parts of the network struggling to hold their water. The Canal & River Trust has announced 16 additional water-saving projects, on top of its existing winter programme of 136 lock gate replacements and other high-priority repairs across its 2,000-mile network.

For Birmingham, a city with more miles of canal than Venice and a network that depends on reservoirs and feeders to keep it topped up, it is welcome news.

Learning from a dry summer

The trust says the new package is built on what it learned during the severe drought of summer 2026, when it moved to its highest level of operational response and focused its teams on keeping water in the canals. That meant repairing lock gates and paddles, finding and fixing leaks, improving the channels that feed water into the network and bringing forward repairs where temporary closures allowed.

The 16 projects had already been seen as good investments, but the trust says the droughts made them more urgent, so they have been brought forward to be finished, where possible, before the busier summer months.

What the work includes

The projects stretch from the Lancaster and Leeds & Liverpool canals in the north to the Kennet & Avon in the south. They include:

• a new lock gate at Hurleston on the Shropshire Union Canal;
• repairs to reduce leaks on the Shropshire Union, Leeds & Liverpool, South Stratford and Trent & Mersey canals;
• restoring the Seend Feeder on the Kennet & Avon Canal, which could supply five million litres of water a day;
• maintenance on several feeders that bring water from reservoirs, including Rudyard and Knypersley in Staffordshire;
• lock and paddle repairs on the Huddersfield Narrow, Leeds & Liverpool and Grand Union canals.

Together, the trust says, the projects will save large amounts of water every day and help move water to where it is most needed. They should also cut down on emergency measures such as refilling stretches of canal and locking flights overnight to keep levels up.

"More than 200 years old"

Malcolm Horne, the trust's chief operations officer, said: "We have used what we learned during the summer to identify the repairs that can make the greatest difference to making the canal network more resilient to drought."

"Our canals are more than 200 years old and were not designed for the increasingly frequent extremes of weather we are now experiencing," he added. "We cannot remove every risk, but targeted investment of this kind will make the network more resilient and help us keep canals available for boaters, businesses, communities and wildlife."

The trust is honest that, because of the canals' age and construction, it is neither practical nor possible to stop every leak. Instead it targets the problems that pose the greatest risk to the structures, the water supply and navigation.

Birmingham's canals this winter

The extra projects come alongside the trust's winter programme for the city's own waterways, announced earlier this week, which includes new lock gates for the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. Healthy canals matter well beyond boating: the towpaths are some of the city's most-used walking and cycling routes, and the water is a corridor for wildlife through the heart of Birmingham.

Details of any closures needed for the work will be published on the trust's notices and stoppages pages.