Bingley Five Rise Locks
Interesting facts
- About 30,000 people are said to have turned out for the opening in 1774, and the first boat took just 28 minutes to climb the whole staircase.
- A second staircase, the Bingley Three Rise, opened at the same time only a few hundred yards downstream.
- The five chambers share just six gates between them, and the intermediate and bottom gates are counted among the tallest lock gates in Britain.
- Each chamber is a little over 14 feet wide, built for the broad boats of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal rather than narrowboats alone.
- A single replacement gate with its balance beam weighs more than five tonnes; a new set was fitted in January 2012.
- Lock keeper Barry Whitelock looked after the flight for almost 30 years until 2017 and received an MBE for services to inland waterways.
- The flight celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2024 and is still worked by hand, gate by gate.
Why it is worth it
Bingley Five Rise Locks carry the Leeds and Liverpool Canal up one of the steepest sections of its route, in the town of Bingley in West Yorkshire. They were designed and built under the canal's chief engineer, John Longbotham, and opened on 21 March 1774 after about three years of construction, an event marked at the time by large crowds gathering to watch the first boats pass through.
The five locks form a continuous staircase rather than a series of separate chambers spaced apart by open water: the lower gate of each lock also serves as the upper gate of the one below it, so a boat moves directly from one chamber into the next. Over the flight's length of about 320 feet (98 metres), boats are raised or lowered a total of roughly 59 feet 2 inches (18 metres), a gradient of around 1:5 that makes it the steepest flight of locks anywhere on the English and Welsh canal network.
The flight remains in everyday use by leisure boaters navigating the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and is listed Grade I for its historic and engineering importance, drawing visitors who come simply to watch boats work their way through the staircase.
Getting there
The locks are about 0.8 km from Bingley town centre; the nearest airport is Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA), about 11.7 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Bingley Five-Rise Locks is a staircase lock on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Bingley. As the name implies, a boat passing through the lock is lifted or lowered in five stages.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
53.85580, -1.83790per Wikidata