Sunday saw campaigners gather on the canal next to the Mailbox calling on the government to increase funding to help maintain the waterways. I'm here in Birmingham to get people's thoughts on the city's iconic canals and whether the government should do more to preserve them.
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00:00 I think regarding the canals in Birmingham, if you're local, well as opposed to anybody,
00:06 they are a great heritage. It's lovely to walk along, it's lovely to see. We've had
00:11 friends recently come up from London and they absolutely loved it. It's like with anything
00:16 else at the moment, we're in a cost of living crisis, where's all the money going for us?
00:21 So in an ideal world, yeah, absolutely, throw more money out.
00:25 Yeah, yeah, definitely invest more in the canal waterway system. It's a very iconic
00:30 part of Birmingham, so they should definitely maintain it and probably improve it as well,
00:34 the number of services they have.
00:37 Okay, so my grand old age, I think that they're iconic to Birmingham. I think that Birmingham
00:42 has a lot of bad press, as the papers always report. And I think that it's taken television
00:51 to actually bring a highlight actually, highlight how good and how historic they are and the
00:56 purpose that they were built for and still exist. And bring tourism to Birmingham, go
01:01 and look at them. They're beautiful, but it does need more money invested. It does need
01:06 more money.
01:07 Okay, so canal is an important part and I think government shouldn't stop funding for
01:14 canal and they should increase. No decrease, they should increase, because this is an important
01:20 part of Birmingham. We cannot let it away. We cannot make our canal more filthy. We need
01:28 to make it more fresh. So government should increase the funding, not the decreasing.
01:35 I work in schools, so for me, the funding kind of goes in. Or, you know, I'd like to
01:40 see the money being put into schools and being put into mental health support and things
01:44 like that. But the canal system is a lovely part of Birmingham. And obviously, it's really
01:49 nice for people to be able to go for walks along the canal and things like that.
01:53 Well, I think the canal should be funded much more than, you can see now how the canal,
01:59 the condition of the canal is. I think it might be used as one of the main transportation
02:03 in Birmingham as it was used previously. It's something that is just one of the main trademarks
02:11 of Birmingham City. And you cannot just cut that because you don't want to provide money
02:15 for it. It's a beautiful place to be honest to stay at, to attract tourists to the city.
02:22 So I think you can use the canal more by applying or funding it more. And yeah, that's it.
02:33 To be honest, I've never really thought about that prior to now. I think they are a nice
02:39 thing to have in the city. Nice like viewpoint and stuff because there's not that many green
02:45 spaces and things. So I think from that point of view, it's quite nice. But I wouldn't necessarily
02:51 think cutting funding is a great thing. But then again, I don't know, I don't really know
02:56 much about, well, how much is spent on them or anything like that. So it's not really
03:00 anything I've thought about actually prior to now.
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