Independent. Built from Canal & River Trust's own published notices, with no affiliation to or endorsement by the Trust.
The archive / Data
Download the data
Regenerated nightly. Read the method page first — several columns are deliberately blank where no honest figure exists.
| File | What it contains |
|---|---|
| cadence.csv | Updates and the longest silence on each closure. |
| causes.csv | Closure-days by cause. |
| closures.csv | One row per closure, with every field the archive holds. |
| denominators.csv | Waterway lengths and asset counts, and their licence. |
| durations.csv | How many closures fall in each duration band. |
| mapping.csv | One row per notice and each waterway it names. |
| open_ended.csv | Closures with no published reopening date, longest first. |
| pre-migration.csv | Notices still open on migration day, one row per update. |
| regions.csv | Closures and closure-days by CRT region. |
| waterways.csv | Closures and median duration by waterway. |
Reading the files
- Cadence
- How often CRT added an update to a notice in its lifetime. A notice carried over in the migration can show an artificially low cadence, because only its later updates survive.
- Longest silence
- The longest gap either between two updates, or between the last update and the reopening date. For a closure still shut it is measured to today. A long silence on an open closure is the finding, so it has its own column.
- Defensible duration
- The days between a closure's start and its reopening date, counted only where the dates allow it. A cancelled notice, or one whose reopening precedes its start, has none and is in no total.
- Mapping
- One row per notice and each waterway it names. A notice that names two canals is two rows; nothing is lost to a joined display string.
Column dictionary: closures.csv
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| id | CRT's notice identifier (UUIDv7, which carries its creation time). |
| title | The notice's published title. |
| waterway | The waterway string as CRT filed it; one notice can name two. |
| waterways | That string split on commas, separated by semicolons. |
| region | CRT's region field. |
| cause | Cause read from the notice prose, never from a CRT field. |
| asset | The asset the cause affected, read from the prose. |
| reason | CRT's own reason field, kept separate from the cause. |
| planned | True when CRT's programme id marks scheduled maintenance. |
| status | Still shut, Scheduled or Reopened, judged against the build day. |
| partial | True for a restriction rather than a full navigation closure. |
| start | Start date, ISO format. |
| end | Published reopening date, blank where none is published. |
| days | Full duration in days; blank where none is defensible. |
| days_archive | Days inside the archive window, from May 2025. |
| season_days | Days inside the 15 March to 31 October cruising season. |
| planned_days | Announced length of a closure that has not started. |
| extent | The locks or bridges the closure sat between, where recorded. |
The pre-migration file
CRT migrated to its current notice system on 1 May 2025 and carried over only the notices still open; completed ones were not. CRT's own notices link to a spreadsheet as the pre-migration history, and that link is live while the file returns HTTP 404.
pre-migration.csv is a copy recovered from the Internet Archive. It is not a history of earlier closures: it holds the notices still open on migration day, one row per update. It is read separately and never added to a closure figure.
Licences
Closure notices are Canal & River Trust's own published notices, reproduced with attribution to the Trust. They remain the Trust's copyright.
Waterway lengths and asset counts in denominators.csv come from CRT's ArcGIS open data. Their licence is stated three incompatible ways — data.gov.uk lists it as Other (Non-Commercial), the portal metadata says CC-BY-SA, and an Ordnance Survey End User Licence is referenced. They are published here under the strictest reading: non-commercial use, attribution to Canal & River Trust, and no warranty. Anything derived from them carries the same terms.