This drawing is based on a series of photographs taken during a journey on our canal boat in 2011. The canal seems a hidden world apart from the monumental brutalist M6 thundering overhead to Spaghetti Junction.
The towpath retains the marks from the canal’s original industrial purpose, like the wear on corner posts from tow ropes of horse-drawn narrowboats. Maybe my husband’s great grandfather – who ran a boat and butty from Stoke on Trent – contributed to them.
This canal junction is less than a mile from the house in Nechells – now slum cleared – where my mother and grandmother were born.
