Protection of historical heritage

Published: Monday, 13 August 2018

I DON'T think I've ever seen such a thick-headed, know-nothing, philistine utterance than that regarding the protection of historical heritage during the construction of the Thames sewage system, writes Paul Burke.

Considered the canals?

I wonder if the originator considered that many canals, existing and under restoration, are seriously in the way of HS2, main roads, opencast mines, and seriously profitable housing and leisure developments.

The correspondent, perhaps, owns a boat, and pays his licence fee, perhaps an outrageous £700 a year or so. There might be 30,000 boats like his on the system, and between them they pay about £21,000,000 pounds. Whew, what a lot. 

A little unsatisfactory

Except that it costs about £125 million to run the canal system (when it's done right), and CaRT are trying to do it for £85 million, which is one reason so much is currently just a little unsatisfactory. So for every pound you pay, somebody else has to pay between £3 and £6.

And a cavil about an adjustment to a multibillion (essential) engineering scheme to save information many hundreds of years old, that will be lost if destroyed!