Stourbridge Extension Canal

In the 1820s, a number of coal mines opened up in the Kingswinford area, which was just to the north-west of the Fens branch of the Stourbridge Canal. Although a survey was carried out by Samuel Hodgekinson for a canal or a railway to service the mines, no definite proposals emerged. Gibbons and Co., owners of the first mine to open, built a tramway to Brockmoor in 1825, and a railway from the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal was constructed by Lord Dudley, which opened in 1829, but there were further plans for both canals and railways to the area of Shutt End. The Stourbridge Canal company then proposed an extension of their canal to Shutt End, but the scheme was opposed by Lord…

The canal was barely open, when the railways posed a threat. The Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway was active in the area, and in 1845 applied for an act of Parliament to authorise a number of routes, one of which would run along the banks of the canal. An agreement was reached, whereby the railway company would buy the canal if the act was granted. It was, as the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway Act 1845 (8 & 9 Vict. c. clxxxiv), and the canal passed into the hands of the railway company on 27 March 1847. Unlike many such takeovers, the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway Act 1845 specified that the canal was to be well maintained, that tolls were not to be…

Most of the canal was filled in after its abandonment. A trading estate covers most of the northern end of the Sandhill Branch, and housing has been built over the middle section. A short stub, from the Brockmoor Junction with the Stourbridge Canal to the stop lock at Bromley has been retained in water, and mooring facilities with a boundary fence were constructed by British Waterways on the north bank of the stub in 2004.