The water slope at Montech

This pleasure barge was just entering the lock as I arrived to see the famous water slope, la pente d'eau, at Montech in south west France.  Actually, I'd never heard of it before but there were an awful lot of direction signs to it, so I followed them.  The canal is the Canal des Deux Mers, made up of the Canal du Midi and the Canal de Garonne, connecting the Atlantic with the Mediterranean Sea. 

The barge, or maybe I should call it a bateau mouche, faced several other locks in quick succession before being able to continue.  It was for this reason that the water slope was developed.

All these locks can take up to 45 minutes to negotiate so a team of engineers designed a totally new method of transporting larger vessels up (or down) the required height.  Alongside the canal, they constructed a new channel which follows the slope of the land.

Two high-powered locomotives equipped with a watertight gate to push the boats up the slope.

This shows the view from the back end of the contraption.  The boat enters the channel and the gate is closed at the bottom, sealing in a wedge of water with it.  The locomotives then push the wedge of water along and up the slope with the boat floating in it.  When it reaches the top, the water level is equalised with the canal, the gate opens and the boat floats on. The slope was first opened in 1974.

In the meantime, however, it has been closed again, "for reasons of security". I'm not sure what that means but the other similar slope at Fonserannes was closed too, in 2001, because it really never worked all that well.

I noticed that they have described the route alongside the canal as a "voie verte" or green way and have planted wild flowers.  They say you can cycle/walk from London to Paris along these routes.  I'm not entirely sure how.

Convent Garden

Source Wikipedia

It's not a typo above, Covent Garden really was once the convent Garden belonging to Westminster Abbey, the land marked in green in the map above from 1572.  It was then surrounded by a wall.  After the dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, the land was taken and eventually ended up in the hands of the Earl of Bedford.

Then came an early example of town planning when a public square was designed with grand homes all around it.  It became very popular, so much so that the people who lived in the grand homes decided to move to areas where there were fewer "undesirables".

The fruit and vegetable market started in a small way but expanded when the Great Fire destroyed many larger markets.  By the mid-18th century it occupied most of the square.

Source: The Victorian Web George P. Landow

The buildings there today were erected during the 19th century but at first they didn't have the glass roof which came during the 1870s.

Floral Hall

The Floral Hall is now officially the Paul Hamlyn Hall although it's still called the Floral Hall in the same way as the Royal Opera House is called Covent Garden.  The Floral Hall was absorbed into the Opera House complex and is now its main public area.

By the 1960s, the congestion in London made it impossible to have a large scale fruit and vegetable market in Covent Garden.  The wholesale market was moved to Nine Elms and the plan was to redevelop the whole area.  Fortunately public outcry prevented the destruction of such a historical part of London and the it has been transformed into a shopping area with cafés and bars and some casual stalls. 

Although the atmosphere is very different now, you can still sense how it must have seemed to Ruth and Tom Pinch in Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewitt:

Many and many a pleasant stroll they had in Covent Garden Market; snuffing up the perfume of the fruits and flowers, wondering at the magnificence of the pineapples and melons; catching glimpses down side avenues, of rows and rows of old women, seated on inverted baskets, shelling peas

....Many a pleasant stroll among the waggon-loads of fragrant hay, beneath which dogs and tired waggoners lay fast asleep, oblivious of the pieman and the public-house.