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'If you find a gun, you phone the police': Fishing for firearms, knives and grenades along Britain's canals
18 June 2025, 14:22 | Updated: 18 June 2025, 14:32
Along the canals of the North West there is a small band of environmental enthusiasts hoisting tonnes of metal out of the water.
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Sometimes it’s guns and machetes, other times it may be grenades, sex toys and motorbikes. Not only are they cleaning up the waterways, but they are also unlocking the mystery of what lies beneath the surface.
Paul “Magnet-Man” Hoolihan told LBC: “The main thing people normally talk about are guns, knives, your samurai swords. We have a hotline to the army barracks in Chester for if we find any grenades or old artillery finds, because we have to get them involved straight away. They’ll take them away, find a field, sandbag it, and blow it up. We do get lots and lots of them.
“My ultimate find was a Sten Machine Gun that was in mint condition, I found it in Liverpool and it’s now in a museum.
“Anything precious like gold, platinum, silver – it doesn’t stick to the magnet so you have to hope it gets caught up around the metal attached to the magnet. One chap found a full cashbox with medals inside – it was worth about £5,000. There was nothing inside for us to trace it back to anyone though.”
Alastair Rogers from Welsh Dragon Magnets told LBC: “If you find a gun, what we do is phone the police, they’ll assess it, armed response come and they’ll take it away. We just phone them all in.
“We’ve had safes. We had one full of passports, South African medals, iPads, phones, all wrecked.”
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FISHING FOR GUNS
While chatting, Paul pulls out another haul of treasure: “We’ve got razor blades, a ‘smoking pipe’ of some form… you get coins, the amount of coins that must be in the canals is unbelievable, there must be millions and millions of pounds worth. I don’t know why people throw them in. If we found a wishing well we’d make a fortune!
“The knives and machetes, we went through a phase of finding a lot because of the amnesty. People were scared of handing them in so they throw them in the canal.
“On the grimmer side of things, we’ve found bags with bones in. We don’t know if it’s a cat or a dog, or a fox, but it’s really upsetting. Everything you can think of comes out of the canal.
“You get a lot of bullets, lots of shells from shot guns, but it’s all to do with people going out shooting or ratting, not the fact they’ve just done a bank job.
“We find a lot of burner phones, there’s never any sim cards in them. Alastair has a collection, every type you can think of. It’s an educational thing for the kids. The other day we actually had a phone box out.
“We found a safe in Liverpool inside a gas cylinder. It looks like sometime in the 1970s, some gang has done a burglary and inside was four sealed bags with money in, but the money over time had gone to like a thick, black peat. It was no good. Someone’s dumped it and over time the water has moved it, someone has gone back and not found it.
Alastair added: “Vapes are the bane of our lives. We pull them all out and put them into recycling. We’re finding ten a day at least. We used to find a lot of fidget spinners that kids will have dropped in.
“I like all the car keys – there was a Rolls Royce key found in here about six months ago. Has someone lost it off the back of a boat or has it been stolen and thrown in there?
“We’ve had quite a few old bombs and grenades out which we put it in a bucket of water and make sure they’re stable. We phone it into the police, they get the bomb squad out and they decide what to do.
“A lot of that stuff has been in the water since the 40s when they used to carry it along the canals.
While the items recovered from the water may raise eyebrows, for Paul it is about cleaning up the canals, he said: “It’s only a really small percentage, we’re probably doing 0.1% of what could be done on the waterways. It is nice to think you can do something that’s going to help society a tiny bit.
"The plastics in the water is absolutely unbelievable, caught up with all the metal we get out. But, we take everything away with us.
“The Canal and River Trust don’t mind us doing it, because we’re helping them out and getting stuff out. The majority of the canals don’t get done."
