Leeds & Liverpool Canal

Built in stages between 1770 and 1816, the  Leeds & Liverpool Canal is Britain’s longest canal and arguably its most scenic, meandering 127 miles though the Pennines and along the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Included amongst its 92 locks is the Grade-I listed Bingley Five Rise – a set of staircase locks that take boats up or down the one-in-five grade from the floor of the Aire Valley. It was regarded as one of the world’s greatest engineering marvels when it opened in 1774. More than 30,000 spectators descended on the old market town of Bingley to watch the first boats pass through the locks. Two hundred and fifty years later the Bingley Five Rise, like all the rest of the locks on Britain’s historic 2000-mile canal are still in daily use – not as transport arteries but as home to a floating community of canal dwellers such as myself. I first arrived on the grand old Leeds & Liverpool Canal in 2024, having taken my 58-foot traditional narrowboat up through Leeds via the Aire & Calder Navigation, on whose waters I’d spent the previous winter. I fell in love with the Leeds & Liverpool and have been travelling back and forth, photographing this picturesque waterway ever since.