Museums
Toddington. Newport Pagnell. Northampton. Watford Gap. The names of M1 service stations speak not of glamorous travel nor the golden age of motoring, but of the aroma of chip fat and diesel in the nostrils. Better perhaps when heeding the signs to take a break to exit to a different kind of restorative.
Barely five miles down the A508 from Junction 15 of the M1, the southern Northampton turn-off, is Stoke Bruerne where there’s been a museum beside the Grand Union Canal for almost half a century. This is the pioneer canal museum in the UK; the national museum, organised by British Waterways, moved long ago to Gloucester Docks where, among the big redbrick buildings of an inland dockyard, there’s scope for exhibits big and small.
Stoke Bruerne is smaller, a former corn mill on the canal bank. And its collection of exhibits, on two floors above a shop and café, is quirky, local and episodic. It’s as much about life on the boats and at the canal side as it is about the waterways network, and history in Stoke Bruerne isn’t so much about the fabled Brindleys and Telfords of distant yesteryears as about more recent and local memories.
So there are cabinets of brightly painted canalware pots and pans, and models of boats. There’s a special show on the women, many from upper-crust backgrounds, who took on canal-boat delivery of coal and bulk goods in the Second World War.
And there’s a guide to the Blisworth tunnel, just north of Stoke Bruerne, and at 2.8km the ninth-longest canal tunnel in the world. There’s no towpath through Blisworth; in early canal days you “legged” it, lying on the top covers and walking your boat through. Outside the museum, there are rides through the tunnel and also southwards. There’s also, strangely, an Indian restaurant and, across the lock gates, or by bridge for the faint-hearted, a long, low canalside pub, The Boat, which does boat trips of its own. It’s pretty quiet.
Further north up the M1, south of Leicester, there’s the Foxton locks canal museum. And, from Watford Gap services, if you escape on foot through the back entrance, there’s the Watford staircase locks, interlinked pounds climbing a hillside. Neither of these is as easy to find or as tranquil as Stoke Bruerne. Worth taking a break to find.