Last weekend, a new phone app was launched by the Canal and River Trust, looking at the history of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal between Bingley and World Heritage Site Saltaire.

As reported in the T&A, it is the first canal network app. It includes a walking trail linking the two towns as well as information about cafes, pubs and public transport along the way.

That section of the Bingley-Saltaire man-made waterway is a prized feature of the leisure/pleasure industry. But as Steve Higham, of the Canal and River Trust said, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal is an 18th century engineering “marvel”, and chief among the marvels along its 127-mile (204 kilometre) route is Bingley’s Five Rise Locks.

Two hundred and forty-six years ago in 1766 a meeting was held in Bradford’s Sun Inn to discuss and promote the idea of constructing a canal linking Hull on the east coast to Liverpool on the west.

More than half-a-century before railways, road and water were the main means of transport, flat-bottom barges hauled by horses along man-made canals could shift immeasurably more tonnage than horse-drawn wheeled carts on rutted roads. Canals were the super highways of their time.

Work started on what was to become the Leeds-Liverpool Canal in 1770. The dug-out waterway linking Yorkshire and Lancashire was designed and built by James Brindley, John Longbotham (who took over after Brindley’s death) and Robert Whitworth.

Reportedly finished in 1816, the canal was extended in 1822. By the 1860s, more than a million tons of coal were being transported by canal every year to Liverpool. The working life of the canal lasted until the 1970s.

An integral part of this major engineering feat was the construction of 91 locks along the route to counter the rise and fall of the landscape.

Probably the most famous of them all is the ‘staircase lock’, Five Rise Locks, at Bingley, a more historic landmark than Damart’s chimney – one of the recurring images in Jane Fielder’s ‘Janescape’ paintings.

The Bingley artist comes into this story because, from tomorrow, she is putting on an exhibition of photographs about the locks at her Bingley Gallery.

The Grade I-listed locks have a total of ten gates. Each half-gate is a little over 7ft wide. The two half-gates close to form a V shape, pointing upstream. Between each set of gates is a stone chamber. The drop between the highest lock gates and the lowest is nearly 60 ft (just over 18 metres), making Five Rise Locks the steepest in the UK.

Every 25 years, for more than 200 years, the immense English green oak gates of the steepest locks in Britain have been painstakingly replaced. This exhibition documents the 39-day changing of the Five Rise lock gates, from last January. It captures a fascinating glimpse of the locks drained of all water and offers a window into our industrial heritage.

A team of nine men from British Waterways, now the Canal and River Trust, did the work in January and February and agreed to let Bingley-based professional photographer Tom Handbury, 31, to chronicle the job.

He took more than 600 pictures as the contractors replaced the large lengths of wood. More than 70 of them can be seen at Jane’s month-long exhibition.

Tom said: “It wasn’t a commission. It was a project I wanted to do because for the past four years I have lived just down the road from Five Rise Locks. I was there for about seven days during the four weeks.

“There were four sets of gates that were taken out, the bottom set of two were left. There are 18 main pictures in the gallery, with a timeline of 60 smaller pictures with a date and a short description of the image.

“I invested into this. I am actually a portrait photographer, that’s the source of my income, but I put about £1,000 into this exhibition.”

Five Rise Locks started operating on March 12, 1774. The first boat through them took 28 minutes to move over a distance of 320ft (98 metres). The story goes that when the Gargrave-to-Leeds section of the canal opened, more than 30,000 people turned out to celebrate. Many of them would have been labourers who worked with pick and shovel to dig out the waterway.

During the replacement work this year the locks were drained, enabling people to go down to the bottom of the normally water-filled chambers.

Tom Handbury’s exhibition of photographs opens at Jane Fielder’s Bingley Gallery, 29A Park Road, runs until November 11. Opening times are Thursday-Friday noon-6pm, Saturday-Sunday 10 am-5pm. Closed Monday to Wednesday. Admission is free.