The canals were once the arteries of England, the waterways that changed our lives in the industrial era.

And they are being celebrated in a new TV series which begins tonight and which is presented and and written by Bradford Industrial Museum’s Liz McIvor.

Appropriately enough, the first episode of the six-part series, which is on BBC Four at 8pm this evening, looks at Yorkshire and how the canals were first created.

Canals: The Making of a Nation, will look at how the ‘golden age’ of canals opened up trade and acted as a catalyst to the industrial revolution in the 1770s-1830s.

Liz McIvor is an expert in industrial history and a curator at Bradford’s Industrial Museum, and she is passionate about canals and the role in our history.

She says: “The canals have been covered by television programmes before, which have lately tended to focus on them as pleasureways.

“This is how most of us know and love them today…but not so long ago they were used for the opposite of leisure and were not the rural idyll they now seem.

“Although so many use them, it can be hard to see how they relate to each other and get a sense of the rich history and culture they were and remain, a part of.

“We wanted to open up the subject and act as a way in for people who were neither boat owners nor historians.”

The first programme looks at the Leeds-Liverpool canal, and the mammoth engineering programme involved in crossing the Pennines.

Liz says: “Creating a network of canals in this landscape was an uphill challenge - sometimes literally! But connecting the powerhouses of Yorkshire and Lancashire was a great prize at the time of the industrial revolution. What should the engineers do? Should they build over, under, or around the hills? Who succeeded, and who struggled?”

The six episodes cover different aspects of the history of the canals - engineering, geology, capitalism, heritage, the people who live on them and the workers who built them and ply them today. The series will also move around the country examining the impact of the canals on different areas.

Liz says: “Each canal has its own special interest story and each region covered gave a chance to explore a different angle of a massive story.”

The series’ executive producer, Tony Parker, adds: “We wanted to tell a different story about canals – and look at their wider impact and significance in terms of our history.

“Canals have given us so much over the centuries, and continue to do so. Perhaps it is time to build a few more!”

On Liz’s route along The Manchester Ship Canal she tells the story of the men who built our canals – the navigators or ‘navvies’. They represented an ‘army’ of hard physical men who were capable of enduring tough labour for long hours. Many ‘roved’ the countryside looking for work and a better deal.

She says: “They gained a reputation as troublesome outsiders, fond of drinking and living a life of ungodly debauchery.

”The Manchester Ship Canal was the swansong for the navvies and hailed as the greatest engineering feat of the Victorian Age.”

In London and the Grand Junction she tells the story of ‘canal mania’ - a boom period of frenzied activity that helped develop Britain’s modern financial economy, now centred in London.

The canal capitalists made money by investing and speculating in the new inland waterways used to carry fuel and goods around the country. Many of the investors were part of an emerging middle class.

The Grand Junction Canal – built to improve the connection between London and the Midlands – was one of the new routes, and eventually proved to be a good investment for shareholders.

In the episode set on the Grand Union Canal in the East Midlands, Liz tells the story of the people who operated the canal boats, carrying fuel and goods around the country.

She says: “Conditions were tough, days were long. Victorian society began to grow suspicious of these ‘outsiders’ and they gained reputations for criminality, violence and drinking. But was this reputation really deserved?”

Liz also discovers grisly canal crimes, investigates health and welfare on-board working boats, and looks at why canal children were last on the list to be offered safeguards and formal education.

Today the canals are rightly seen as a part of our heritage that needs protecting, but that wasn’t always the case. In the post-war period a programme of restoration began after years of decline and neglect.

Liz says: “Once places of labour and industry, they became places of leisure and tranquillity.”

Canals: The Making of a Nation will broadcast weekly on BBC Four starting tonight at 8pm.