Remembering life on the canals around Warwickshire

An exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum is taking a look back at the Coventry and Oxford canals through photographs.


An Inland Voyage: Life on the Coventry & Oxford Canals will be remembering the lost community of life on the canals in our area.

It will run from 26 June until 30 August and will include a selection of photographs of days gone by.

The photos are from the archive of Coventry factory worker Robert Longden.

Canal at Sutton Stop

It was during the 1940s and 1950s that he recorded this way of working life on the canals, which has now gone.

He met people on the narrow boats around the Sutton Stop canal junction near Hawkesbury and there are also pictures of Coventry's power station - which has now been demolished.

The images, which capture a time before the canals were a used for leisure, have been restored by Robert Longden's great grandson Stephen Pochin.

He said: "The restoration of the archive took many painstaking hours of removing thousands of tiny specs, blemishes and scratches from each image. This work produced some uncanny feelings with the realisation that I was staring at images of people long gone who, when photographed, were peering at my ancestor.

"This exhibition is unique in capturing a society which will never exist again. It presents an historical snapshot that at only 60 to 70 years old seems a lot older."

Stephen will also be doing a talk at the museum on Tuesday, 17 August. For further information, please visit the official Herbert Art Gallery & Museum website:

http://www.theherbert.org/