The Acting Chairman's Report
2007 may have been the 250th anniversary of the opening of the Sankey Canal, but for SCARS it will also be remembered as the year when the Society's founding chairman, The Revd. David Long, called time on his tenure at the top table. We owe a massive debt of gratitude to David for his commitment to SCARS since 1985, and hope that he can continue to produce Canal Cuttings for us.
The membership will have the opportunity to elect its new Chairman at the AGM, and for those interim few months I have been keeping the seat warm for him or her, reflecting on another year when, although we haven't regressed or actually missed significant opportunities to advance restoration, neither can we put our hand on our hearts and say we've made anything happen. It is vital that the Society finds more ways to pull people into the restoration effort, particularly those with relevant skills and experience; as has been evident on many similar schemes round the country, nothing breeds success like success, and we need to start scoring a few wins to make people sit up and realise that the Sankey Canal does have potential. Only then will more people want to become part of that success.
David acknowledged in his Chairman's Report last year that while our aspirations for full restoration of the Canal - and a new link to the rest of the system - remain, we must acknowledge that the heady days of late 1990s lottery funding have been and gone. Even if it weren't for the 2012 Olympics it is unlikely that we, or any other canal scheme, would be in serious contention for the multi-millions needed to make serious in-roads into full restoration. But if we must bide our time (again) for a fully navigable waterway, we must also work hard to establish the canal corridor in the consciousness of everyone who lives, works and visits the three boroughs.
If lottery money is not easily available for restoring canals it is available for encouraging healthy living, for getting cars off the roads, for improving the environment, for generating activities for the seemingly disillusioned youth of today. The Sankey Canal corridor can be a big part of all of these things, and while we wait for the next pots of really big money to appear over the horizon, this is where we must concentrate our efforts over the short to medium term.
The foundations are all there. We have good relationships with councillors and officers in all three boroughs, and through a Halton-led initiative for lottery funding, all three councils (and SCARS) have a table around which we can all sit. That is a forum we must try to maintain; if the canal corridor is to be developed sympathetically in a strategic manner then all parties need to be on board. As ever we need to be watchful of nearby developments such as the new Saints stadium in St Helens, Bewsey Old Hall and Widnes Waterfront (tactfully finding one for each borough!) – these can deliver positive gains for the canal but can just as easily put further obstacles in our way.
Other partnerships such as with Dallam Anglers and the St Helens Heritage Network have given us new opportunities to make our case where it would have been more difficult on our own. We have to pursue more of these; recognising that for the time being at least we are still a pretty small fish in a pretty large sea.
For want of repetition, all of this is much more likely to be achieved if we can persuade more people to play an active part in putting the Sankey firmly on the map – it will also be a lot more fun for all of us ! At the AGM we will expand on what the new Political, Finance, Heritage, Restoration and Communications subgroups are trying to achieve, and I hope that some of you might be persuaded (or can persuade others) to help in some small, or not so small, way to bring about the change in the canal that we all so keenly desire.
ANDY SCREEN
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