When I first cruised the Birmingham Canal Navigations (BCN) in 1999, I was depressed to see modern distance markers dispensing distances in kilowhales and diameters and such. How could they mutilate the old signs, I thought. Wasn't there a sort of moral heritage barrier to stop them?
Mark me down as an unreconstructed traditional measures man. I had metric measures dunned into my head in school, for sure, but I absorbed the customary measures through my skin. I ate, drank and breathed them. And I'm old enough to remember when shillings and pence turned into 'pee'.
I lived with metrication and decimalisation, rather than embraced it. I think most of us did; still do. It's not an issue of sense or ease of use (although I can marshal all the arguments in that direction if you want) - it's a matter of poetry, of variety and charm. It's the slang and local dialect versus the unbending grammar of the Esperanto. It's the bouncing country lane versus the all-seasons motorway. Or in this case, it's the winding, ascending, falling Brindley countour canal versus the merciless direct march of the Fens drain.
So I was delighted when I returned to Birmingham in November, after a gap of 18 months, and found many of the execrable gas-meter measurements pasted over by miles, fractions and yards. Hooray I thought, BW's seen the light, the metric police are backing down.
But no...
Looking closely at a sticker on one of the distance posts, it's actually a guerrilla movement called Active Resistance to Metrication, a sort of provisional wing of the British Weights & Measures Association. I phoned the number on the sticker, and spoke to a guy called Derek Norman, who's the BWMA Liaison Officer (email address: 'rebeldel@...'). He told me that this has been going on for some months, and in the best distancing tradition of 'official' organisations like Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein he explained that the BWMA really isn't involved in ARM's equivalent of cottage burnings or kneecappings.
He also explained that the signs are actually illegal, as by law all UK road signs must be in feet and toes, as opposed to kilohertz and gas meters. On the BWMA website they call it 'direct action' and explain they've been doing it all across the country. They've successfully 'legalised' a large and growing number of these signs on the BCN.
So I rang the local BW office for their view. A spokesman told me - unofficially, I think - that in theory BW disapproves of it, but frankly there are more pressing problems of canal maintenance to tackle, not to mention the rash of obscene graffiti. And besides, he pointed out, there never were canal distance signs in the old days and the existing ones were installed by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership about 20 years ago as an amenity when the BCN canals were opened up to pedestrian access. A DEFRA document explains:
The regeneration process was kick-started in 1983 by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership (Birmingham City Council, the former West Midlands County Council and British Waterways) which drew up a programme of physical improvements that have continued to this day. They have embraced heritage and conservation initiatives, improved pedestrian accessibility, canal-related economic activity, increased tourism, signage and interpretation, recreation and nature conservation. Corridor Studies were also completed by British Waterways, guiding canal improvement, and setting the context for development.
Where this leaves ARM, legally, I don't know, since the towpaths are mostly still BW private property, and presumably the offending signs are not technically public distance-posts. But I'll give them a quiet cheer - more power to their elbows, to their little white squares and black magic markers, and to their adhesive.
I'd consider them valiant guerillas and give them three rousing cheers, were it not that I'm uneasy on two other points.
- The traditional way of measuring canal distances, as I understand it, was in miles, furlongs and chains. A distance of 240 yards would have been expressed as about 1f 1ch, for example, or perhaps colloquially 'a furlong' (and a bit). It would surely not be '240 yards'.
Last week, further down the Aston Flight, there's one of those new (but old-looking) signs at the Waterlinks office development, and significantly it features distances in miles and eighths of a mile (i.e. furlongs). It's the only one of these signs I've seen that does it correctly. 
The BMWA's resistance, as far as I can tell, doesn't seem to come from love of - or knowledge of - the old measures, but from the hatred of the imposition of laws by central government. And more specifically, from the government of the United Europe.
This latter point seems to be the nub of their argument. It's why I can't really cheer too loudly. I'm a Briton and a big-world Empire/Commonwealth loyalist (I really am). But I want the charm of my darling, poetic measures to reappear for their own sake, and not as part of some political turf war.
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