Ever watch Robin Hood: Men in Tights where Little John falls in a little stream? That’s an accurate representation of the English. The Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish have enjoyed watching this for centuries.

Note: As a Canadian, I’m allowed to make that joke.

Maybe drowning in a canal is to the UK what falling out a window is to Russia.

If it was around a lock or, some larger basin, something like that I could imagine it. Some locks and junctions can have strong and very weird currents and inexplicably deep sections…

Other than that you could slip, knock yourself out.

Jump off a bridge into one ? - I bet that’s a darwin award someone has bagged.

Many of them are deep enough to submerge shopping trolleys and bikes, fall on them and break your back or something.

I dunno about “so many” though? I’d think a lot more die in natural streams or lakes, or steeply canalised watercourses or reservoirs.

I for one would not go in one as i think you’d immediately get a million nasty diseases.

Being only 3 to 4 meters deep would make them more dangerous to the average grown-up, I would say. If you jump or fall in, you are much more likely to get hurt. Also alcohol.

I haven’t heard that yet. How many thousands were it last week?

I’m unreliably informed that the absolute minimum amount of liquid to drown a human is 1 liter. That might require a special head-shaped bucket, but it seems plausible.

But out of curiosity, what sort of statistics are you seeing about UK people falling into canals? I know they have canals and people, but I thought the trope was shopping trolleys (USA: shopping carts) falling into canals. Is this a serious issue? Can we find comparable figures from the canal-strewn Netherlands for comparison?

I haven’t heard that, but I imagine alcohol was involved.

It is possible for an adult to drown in water that wouldn’t get your ankles wet.