A CANAL museum in King’s Cross was given a royal opening on Monday as Princess Anne cut the ribbon on its new exhibition.

The Princess Royal, who is the patron of the London Canal Museum, got a first glimpse at the new exhibition “Building Britain’s Canals”, which celebrates the work of the surveyors and engineers who designed Britain’s canals, and the thousands of labourers, “the navvies”, who worked in difficult conditions to build them.

Martin Sach, chair of the London Canal Museum, said: “Canals became the transport arteries of the industrial revolution, carrying goods of all sorts between manufacturing centres and ports. At its peak, the canal system in the UK stretched for nearly 4,000 miles.

“The canal engineers were the celebrities of their time, designing and building groundbreaking structures and incredible feats of engineering that would become world famous, including the UNESCO World Heritage Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in North Wales.”

He added: “This new exhibition celebrates their achievements, which led to the creation of the profession of civil engineering, and that of ‘the navvies’, who constructed the canals using picks, shovels and wheelbarrows.”