A waterway with a purpose
Cutting quietly through the wooded countryside of Surrey and Sussex is a canal that once carried an ambitious dream: a continuous inland waterway linking London to the English Channel. The Wey & Arun Canal was the missing central link in that chain. By joining the River Wey in the north to the River Arun in the south, it allowed barges to travel, in theory, all the way from the Thames at Weybridge down to the sea at Littlehampton without ever venturing onto the open coast. It is this grand idea — “London’s lost route to the sea” — that still animates the people working to bring the canal back to life today.
An idea centuries in the making
The notion of connecting the Wey and the Arun was not a sudden Victorian enthusiasm. As early as 1641, there was a serious proposal for a short two-mile cut near Dunsfold to bridge the two river systems. Nothing came of it, and the idea slumbered for well over a century.
It was reawakened by the pressures of the Napoleonic era, when coastal shipping was vulnerable to French privateers and a safe inland route to Portsmouth and the south coast suddenly looked very attractive. In 1784 a petition was presented to the House of Lords, and an Act of Parliament was eventually granted to authorise the work. Local landowners, most notably the Earl of Egremont at Petworth House, threw their weight — and their money — behind the scheme, seeing the commercial benefit of linking their estates to the wider waterway network and ultimately to the Thames.
Building the canal
Construction of the Wey & Arun Junction Canal began in 1813 under the contractor Zachariah Keppel. The route was surveyed and designed by the engineer Josias Jessop, son of the celebrated canal engineer William Jessop, who laid out the line of the canal together with its bridges, locks, culverts and lock-keepers’ cottages. When Keppel ran into financial difficulty and went bankrupt, the supervising civil engineer May Upton stepped in, later becoming the canal’s first Superintendent.
The work was completed in just three years, and the canal opened in 1816. It was a substantial piece of engineering for its day: roughly 23 miles long, some 30 feet wide and three and a half feet deep, with 23 locks, 35 bridges, eight wharves, five lock-keepers’ cottages and two aqueducts carrying it over the rivers in its path. Running from the Wey Navigation near Shalford, south of Guildford, to the Arun Navigation at Newbridge, it completed the long-imagined chain of waterways between the capital and the coast.
The canal in its heyday
For a few decades the canal did exactly what its promoters had hoped. It brought the wider world into a quiet corner of the countryside. Coal came up from the coast so that fires could burn something other than wood; chalk, lime and building materials moved to where they were needed; imported goods landed from ocean-going ships at Portsmouth could be carried inland; and roofs that had once been thatched could now be tiled, because tiles could finally be delivered cheaply by water.
Agricultural produce, timber and other local goods travelled the other way. For the villages strung along the route, the canal was a genuine artery of trade, connecting them to markets they could never easily have reached by the rough roads of the time.
Decline and closure
The canal’s success, however, was short-lived. Almost as soon as it had established itself, the railway revolution arrived. Trains were faster, cheaper and unaffected by frozen or drought-stricken water levels, and they swiftly stripped the canal of the very trade that justified its existence. Traffic dwindled through the middle of the nineteenth century until the canal was no longer viable.
The Wey & Arun was formally abandoned in 1871, a little over half a century after it had opened. The locks fell derelict, the channel silted up, banks slumped, and long stretches were sold off, filled in or simply reclaimed by nature. For the best part of a hundred years the canal effectively vanished from the map, surviving only as overgrown ditches, half-remembered bridges and the occasional lock chamber lost in the undergrowth.
A sleeping waterway rediscovered
By the middle of the twentieth century, attitudes to Britain’s derelict canals were beginning to change. What had been seen as obsolete industrial relics were increasingly valued as green corridors, heritage landscapes and places for quiet recreation. Enthusiasts began to walk the old lines, trace the buried structures and imagine what restoration might achieve. The Wey & Arun, with its evocative “lost route to the sea” story, was an obvious candidate for revival.
The Trust is born
That enthusiasm took formal shape in 1973 with the founding of the Wey & Arun Canal Trust, a registered charity dedicated to restoring the waterway. What began as a small band of volunteers with spades and vision has grown, over more than five decades, into an organisation of real substance. In 2023 the Trust celebrated its fiftieth anniversary — a milestone that few of its founders could have been certain of reaching.
Today the Trust has almost 3,000 members and around 300 active volunteers, who between them contribute in the region of 21,000 hours of work every year. A small full-time staff oversees the operation, running an apprenticeship programme and coordinating specialist contractors alongside the volunteer workforce. Its aims reach well beyond simply digging out an old channel: the Trust is committed to conserving and enhancing the natural environment, improving public access, promoting recreation, supporting education and volunteering, and researching the canal’s heritage.
Restoration achievements
The results are tangible. Over fifty years the Trust has purchased or leased around 8 miles of the original line and has restored 11 locks, 24 bridges and both aqueducts. Roughly 10 miles of towpath are now open and walkable, and about 3 miles of the canal are once again in water and navigable by small craft. It is painstaking, expensive work — each rebuilt lock and bridge represents years of fundraising, planning permissions and volunteer labour — but the map of restored sections grows steadily longer.
Loxwood, the beating heart
The public face of the revived canal is at Loxwood in West Sussex, where the most complete stretch of restored waterway can be enjoyed. Here the Trust runs trip boats through the spring, summer and autumn, carrying something like 10,000 passengers a year along the water and through working locks. Canoes, kayaks, paddleboards and other small craft are welcome too, and the setting — with its restored locks and tranquil, tree-lined water — gives visitors a vivid sense of what the whole canal could one day become.
The Wey-South Path and its wildlife
For those who prefer to explore on foot, the Wey-South Path traces the line of the canal and its connecting rivers across the two counties, and is marked on Ordnance Survey maps. It offers a long-distance walking route rich in wildlife, where restored and unrestored sections sit side by side and the canal doubles as a wildlife corridor for birds, insects and water-loving plants. The Trust’s annual “Poddle” sponsored walk invites supporters to cover part of the route and raise funds for the restoration at the same time.
The people who make it happen
None of this would exist without people. The Trust is, at heart, a community — members whose subscriptions and donations keep the work funded, volunteers who give their weekends to clear vegetation and rebuild brickwork, apprentices learning traditional skills, and staff holding the whole effort together. It is this collective commitment, sustained across half a century, that has turned a derelict ditch back into a living waterway one section at a time.
The vision, from London to the sea
The ultimate goal remains the one that inspired the canal’s builders two centuries ago: a fully navigable Wey & Arun, reconnecting the Thames and the London river network in the north with the Arun and the English Channel in the south. It is a long-term ambition, dependent on land, funding and countless hours of labour, and it will not be completed quickly. But every restored lock and re-watered mile brings that “lost route to the sea” a little closer to being found again.
How to get involved
Anyone can support the project. People can become members of the Trust, make a donation, volunteer for practical restoration work, join a boat trip at Loxwood or simply walk the Wey-South Path and enjoy the results. Every contribution, large or small, helps carry forward one of the most ambitious canal restoration projects in the country — the reopening of London’s lost route to the sea.
