Thomas Telford mural champions wharf's role in Industrial Revolution

A wharf in Shropshire dating back nearly 200 years "played a key part in accelerating the Industrial Revolution", according to a group restoring it.

Now a mural has been unveiled there celebrating the county's canal heritage - paying homage to 19th Century engineer Thomas Telford and marking the role of the site near the town that was named after him.

"Wappenshall Wharf was definitely a bustling place in its heyday with goods coming by water and road," volunteer Alan Harding said.

"There was a huge variety... anything from bacon and beans to bedding, shovels, pig iron, agricultural crops."

The 1835 wharf site features three Grade II-listed structures - two warehouses and a "skew" curved bridge, which Harding said was "really key to the whole of Wappenshall Wharf".

The junction, which Harding described as "a focal point", marks where the engineer's first and last canals - Shrewsbury and Newport respectively - joined, he explained.

Under the bridge, from 1835, horses could take canal boats and loads up to Norbury junction, north east of Telford, and on to the mainline canal.

"The Shrewsbury canal was quite an early canal, it opened in 1797," he added.

"It was built to carry coal from the east Shropshire coalfields to domestic and industrial users in Shrewsbury."

But while that canal was economically viable on its own, it was isolated and used different 20ft by 6ft "tub boats".

A 70ft by 6ft narrowboat would not navigate the Shrewsbury canal, Harding added.

So after the wharf opened, it allowed goods to be unloaded through hatches "directly up into" a "transhipment warehouse" over water, before being stored and loaded into other boats inside.

The goods could then go on the Newport canal and join the mainline route via the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal.

"The connection to the national canal network made at Wappenshall allowed those new cast iron goods from the Ironbridge Gorge to reach markets as wide as London," Harding said.

But while the Ironbridge Gorge has been described as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and Wappenshall played its part, the canal soon faced a growing challenge.

"The wharf was most busy from its opening in 1835 for the next 10 or 20 years," Harding said.

"At that time the [horse cart] road from the wharf to Wellington was referred to as the busiest road in Shropshire. There was a lot of traffic bringing goods... to go nationally on the canal network.

"Horse-drawn canal boats had been the fastest method of bulk transport - towards 20 tonnes in one boat, whereas a horse and cart [on roads] was much less, under one tonne.

"Goods carried on going through [the canals], but in effect you couldn't compete with the speed of the railways."

The artist behind the mural along a wall at the wharf, Adam Pekr, said he had learned about the history of the area, after moving to Shrewsbury from the Czech Republic two years ago.

"I knew nothing and that was the beauty of it," he explained.

Head gardener Jo Butler said: "Everybody that comes now, the first thing they see is the wall and they start asking questions about it, and therefore they start asking questions about the history."

The wharf site had fallen into neglect, but volunteer group the Shrewsbury and Newport Canals Trust started restoring the wharf and its buildings in 2018.

More than 40 tonnes of material, including rubbish, have been removed, and a cafe opened to the public in December last year in the smaller of the two warehouses, with the trust's income including donations, grants and fundraising.

Harding said it was believed the next significant planned attraction would involve about two to three years' more work.

"The current work at Wappenshall includes continued restoration of the transhipment warehouse to become a visitor centre where we can properly tell the story of Thomas Telford and Shropshire canals and the canals more widely," he said.

"[With] bridges on the Severn, Shrewsbury Castle, Shrewsbury prison, a couple of churches, his contribution to the area was immense and [is] visible to this day."

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