Maybe he's just not very good at canals

I don't want to have a go at Stuart Maconie. I haven't listened to him on the radio for ages, but I'm sure he's very good, and his books  - especially Cider with Roadies and Pies and Prejudice are very funny. I like his style; his affectionate yet not uncritical take, and the details he homes in on.

His books present all manner of obscure and fascinating facts, and this is a big part of what makes them so enjoyable.

But sometimes those facts aren't. Sometimes inaccuracies slip in. I picked up on one such canal-related misrepresentation in Pies and Prejudice way back on the Warrior blog, when he neatly excised the Huddersfield Canal from Ashton to Diggle (and said some slightly careless things about its dimensions).

I'm now reading his Popular History of Britain on the Kindle - so OK, it only cost me £2.99, but equally, it can't be hard to correct errors. And here he doesn't just get a canal wrong; he invents one entirely from scratch. It's called the Airedale Canal, and it occupies the space in Saltaire more usually associated with the Leeds Liverpool. To add slapdash insult to inaccurate injury, he goes on to say - rather dismissively, I thought - that he has no idea why a licenced cafe (or now, according to its website, 'the most happening bar, restaurant and lounge' in Saltaire) would be called 'Don't Tell Titus'. Despite the fact that he has just written pages about Bourneville and its dry nature, he either doesn't know that the same very much applied to Saltaire, or he's not made the connection. That in itself isn't important, but - as I said back in 2007, it makes you doubt the accuracy or care applied to everything else. And it's slightly spoiled for me a book that I had very much been enjoying (and had in fact been about to recommend to a colleague who'll be teaching history next year). A slightly cavalier approach to the facts might be ok in a book poking gentle fun at northerners, but in one purporting to be a history it's a bit less excusable. I shall carry on reading though, because it is quite funny.