Where the canals meet, there is a big level difference, with the Union Canal arriving high on a ridge. The flight of locks that used to join the two vanished in the industrial expansion of Falkirk in the 1930s. Now the Union Canal has been extended a mile, dropped through the two new locks that proved so tempting to the vandals, given a sharp right turn through a new tunnel under the Roman earthwork of the Antonine Wall, thence out on a spectacular aqueduct aimed straight at the Ochil Hills in the distance. At the end of the aqueduct, you encounter the misnamed Wheel. Which is, in fact, a rotary boat lift.
If this was a purely functional object of the kind British canals are rich in, there wouldn’t be so much fuss made of it, and it might have turned out a bit less odd-looking. Essentially, it is a way to make two big tanks of water raise and lower boats 80 feet in a few minutes. This is the first rotating boat lift in the world, but boat lifts generically are nothing new. In fact, they were the kind of the thing Victorian and Edwardian engineers liked to try their hand at. The only surviving example in Britain is the 1875 Anderton Boat Lift, recently restored to prime condition, connecting the Trent and Mersey Canal with the River Weaver in Cheshire.
The Anderton Lift is heavy engineering, with no fripperies. It is working industrial archaeology. But at the Falkirk Wheel, Millennium money was involved. It had to be a visitor attraction in its own right. Which meant that it had to be a funny shape, like Lottery-funded projects up and down the land. And this in turn has led to superfluous details that are certainly not in the great canal engineering tradition.
Architects were brought in to make the lift exciting. They gave it hoops and curves and - the final touch - those perplexing Magimix blades. Which have no functional purpose whatsoever, like the tailfins on a 1950s American automobile. Only not so good looking. Early designs for the Falkirk Wheel, by Dundee-based architects Nicoll Russell Studios, looked more promising - it was a true wheel - but never got further than a model. As so often in the Lottery process, the architect who ends up getting the job turned out to be different: in this case the commission went to RMJM, the architects charged with delivering the late Enric Miralles’ Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh.
The Wheel was simplified, but unfortunately the Millennial desire to achieve a photogenic funny shape remained. Hence the fat curving blades. At first, these were envisaged as part of a pumped-water counterweight system to get the Wheel moving. It turned out to make more sense to install electric motors to power the Wheel’s great steel spindle, but the now useless shapes remained. Jim Stirling, director of British Waterways Scotland, defends them stoutly. “The structure is nothing without them,” he says. I disagree.
True, they impart a bit of visual dynamism to the movement of this boat lift - they emphasise the rotation, like cartoon speed-lines - but on the whole they just look daft and crude. I thought they looked wrong when I saw the first computer images of the design, and I think they look even more wrong now that I have seen them in actuality. They are trying to pretend that the lift is still some sort of wheel when in fact it is more like a giant pair of scales, with the big boat tanks acting as the weights.
