locks are narrow beam and drop the canal down to Bordesley Junction, where the Warwickshire Ring turns to the right. Ahead is the route to Digbeth Basin: in the 1930s it was the Birmingham Hub of a national canal transport system. There are bonded warehouses, an ice house, a major Fellows Moreton & Clayton warehouse, a banana warehouse and in Typhoo Basin, a tea warehouse. From Bordesley Junction, Saltley Cut was reviled as the filthiest place on the whole canal system, with gas works, a power station, railway works and a chemical works all generating or receiving cargoes, and discharging waste into the canal. It has been cleaned up now, and there is new housing facing the waterfront. The five Garrison Locks lower the canal into the valley of the River Rea, which it crosses on an aqueduct. The Rea is a tributary of the River Tame, which it also crosses just before Salford Junction, where the Grand Union Canal meets the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and the Tame Valley Canal. Nechells Shallow Lock once controlled the exit from the Grand Union Canal, but is no longer fitted with gates. The junction and the aqueduct are overshadowed by the road decks of spaghetti junction, which tower above them. Birmingham and Fazeley Canal At Salford Junction, boaters following the Warwickshire Ring turn to the right onto the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, which is sandwiched between the backs of factories and the M6 motorway. The route passes a major electricity high voltage distribution centre on the south bank, before reaching Erdington Hall, where a factory has been built over the canal, almost forming a tunnel, although one side remains open to the light. Close by was Fort Dunlop, where the Dunlop Rubber company made pneumatic tyres, employing 10,000 workers at the peak of production in the 1950s. Eventually the canal re-emerges into the comparative calm of Minworth, where three locks lower the level of the canal. To the south is Minworth Sewage Treatment Works, one of the largest in Britain, capable of treating 220 million gallons (1000 Megalitres) per day. The canal continues through a cutting lined with trees, through the short Curdworth tunnel, which is long, to pass under the M6 Toll motorway. The first of the eleven Curdworth locks is immediately after the bridge, and the canal continues through open countryside and flooded gravel pits, although the M42 motorway is