The Bridgmoor Canal · est. 1898
Slow and certain,
since 1898.
Hesketh & Marlow carry coal, timber, tea and post along forty-one miles of the Bridgmoor Canal, run one of the last working dry docks on the system, and paint every hull in the towyard upstairs. The canal does the timing; we do the colour.
The company
Two families, one canal, no hurry
Isaac Hesketh carried the first coal up the Bridgmoor flight in 1898 with a boat called Constancy and a firm handshake with the Kennel Lane coal yard that held for four generations. The Marlow side brought the paint: Martha Marlow decorated Isaac's hull in her own roses and castles, and the two families tied the knot in business and in fact within a decade.
Today the firm runs eleven boats, a passage service for walkers and gongoozlers, and a boatyard that still caulks by hand. Everything the firm owns is painted at the wharf, in the same bright enamel order Martha kept in a biscuit tin.
What the boats carry
Freight & tollsThe old trade
Coal from the Kennel Lane yard and oak from the Felly woods, the two cargoes that built the firm and still pay its way.
Book cargo space Popular PassengersThe passage service
Four daily runs through the flight and back, seats on the cratch board, tea included, ducks not guaranteed.
Timetable The studioPainted canalware
Roses, castles, humbugs and buckby cans, painted in the towyard by the fifth generation of Marlows.
See the ware The yardDry dock & repairs
One dock, one graving pump from 1911, and a caulking bench nobody has dared to modernise.
Yard services CommissionLivery studio
Your hull, Martha's palette. Full paint schemes from template to top coat in the yard's own studio.
Commission work TradeCharter & trade terms
Standing weekly runs for yards and merchants, one named correspondent, rates fixed each spring.
Trade enquiriesRoses & castles
The paint is the company
Canalware is the folk art of the narrowboats: bright roses and painted castles, buckets and cans decorated in a day, hulls in bands of crimson, ochre and duck-egg blue. Martha Marlow learned it from the boat painters of the Bridgmoor yards and kept a biscuit tin of enamel orders that her great-great-granddaughter still uses as the shop standard.
"A dull boat on the Bridgmoor is nobody's fault but ours."Martha Marlow, 1911
Visit the wharf
Bridgmoor Wharf, open daily
The passage office, the towyard gallery and the yard gate all stand on one towpath. Arrive by boat, by boot or by the 8:12 from Bridgmoor Central, and let the canal set your pace for an hour or two.
Passages run four times daily: 9:00, 11:30, 14:00 and 16:30, from Bridgmoor Basin.