Brindley came back with a largely level but meandering route via Smethwick, Oldbury, Tipton, Bilston and Wolverhampton to Aldersley.

[1][3] On 24 February 1768, an Act of Parliament was passed to allow the building of the canal, with branches at Ocker Hill and Wednesbury[1] where there were coal mines.

[1] The first phase of building was to Wednesbury whereupon the price of coal sold to domestic households in Birmingham halved overnight.

The Birmingham Canal Company head office was finally built there, opposite the western end of Paradise Street.

[4] By 6 November 1769, 10 miles (16 km)[1][3] had been completed to Hill Top collieries in West Bromwich, with a one-mile summit pound at Smethwick.

The canal measured 22+5⁄8 miles (36.4 km),[1] mostly following the contour of the land but with deviations to factories and mines in the Black Country and Birmingham.

There were problems of congestion at Smethwick caused by the time taken to traverse the locks and with supplying sufficient water to the summit level.

[7] Over the next thirty years, as more canals and branches were built or connected it became necessary to review the long, winding, narrow Old Main Line.

[1] He famously travelled the route of the Old Line and reported the existing canal as:[2] "... little more than a crooked ditch, with scarcely the appearance of a towing path, the horses frequently sliding and staggering in the water, the hauling lines sweeping the gravel into the canal, and the entanglement at the meeting of boats being incessant; whilst at the locks at each end of the short summit at Smethwick, crowds of boatmen were always quarrelling, or offering premiums for the preference of passage; the mine owners injured by the delay, were loud in their just complaints."

As with many of the branch canals on the BCN, most of the Wednesbury Oak Loop became officially abandoned from 1954, but the northern stretch remains navigable to the British Waterways workshops at Bradley.

Ryland Aqueduct, built in 1836 carrying the canal over the main A461 road at Dudley Port, Tipton, was rebuilt in the late 1960s at a cost of £170,000[9] (equivalent to £3,897,400 in 2023).

[11] In 1991 at a cost of £22,000 its bare concrete structure was painted blue and white and included an frieze of a narrowboat crossing an old-fashioned brick aqueduct.

[12] The Smethwick Summit - Galton Valley Conservation Area[13] protects the Old and New lines between the Birmingham city boundary and Spon Lane locks.