Whenever a resident of Britain's second city starts to defend his home against the near ritual barracking heaped on it, you can bet one line is not far off: 'You know, Birmingham has more canals than Venice, more parks than London.'Nick Grazebrook is no different.

But then he has turned the first statement -- whether fact or myth -- into a mini-profit centre for Shakespeares, one of Birmingham's best known commercial law firms.

Waterways legislation is perhaps the niche practitioner's ni che practice.

Much of the law dates from the late 18th century and there are no more than a handful of legal experts in the field -- two or three in London, and Mr Grazebrook.Not surprisingly, this is an area of law where it helps if the practitioner has something of an obsession.

Again, Mr Grazebrook fits the bill.

His interest in the canal culture was triggered more than 30 years ago when he bought a house near a waterway in Bromsgrove.

Soon after, he became a boat owner and today -- having moved to a house directly on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal -- he is frequently seen chugging up and down the waterway.The purchase of his first boat in 1964 coincided with the year he was admitted as a solicitor and gradually, through his contacts in recreational boating circles, Mr Grazebrook began to receive instructions from charitable trusts involved in waterway restoration.

That developed into other work from private navigation companies, many of which he acts for to this day.Recently, the great debate in the canal and waterway trade has been over the powers of the government's regulatory body.

In the late 1980s, the British Waterways Board (BWB) became, as Mr Grazebrook describes it, more aggressive in its charging policies.

The board, which had for years since its creation in 1963 been charging a pleasure craft licence fee, decided to levy a new mooring tax.Mr Grazebrook's first main involvement came when the board actively pursued a group of boat owners on the Lancaster Canal in 1989 for the mooring fee payments.

He had previously suggested in the specialist waterways journals that, in his view, it was unlikely that the board had the power in law to collect the new charge.The Lancaster case ended up in a two-day county court hearing.

Mr Grazebrook lost -- a decision he says still baffles him -- but the action raised his profile even further in the boating community.By the middle of 1990, BWB was promoting a piece of general powers legislation through parliament.

Canal enthusiasts were concerned that, as drafted, the bill would give far reaching powers to the board and they enlisted Mr Grazebrook to give evidence in committee.One of the most controversial elements of the BWB-sponsored legislation was a provision which would have removed all pre-1910 rights conferred by private acts on landowners having property adjoining a canal.

Suddenly, anyone who had anything to do with canals and waterways launched into a frenzy of speculation over what was contained in hundreds of years of private legislation.Mr Grazebrook and a small team began burrowing through the old acts -- the high water mark of waterways legislation was hit in 1794.

by the 1840s, the peak of canal building in Britain, most canals had attached to them at least a couple of specific pieces of legislation.

That translates to several hundred acts covering some 2000 miles of canals throughout the country.At the core of the problem, as Mr Grazebrook sees it, was the BWB's policy of imposing connecting charges when a new mooring basin was constructed.

The charges were geared to profits and they were in the main being paid.

But after the BWB had drawn the attention of property owners to the old legislation, question marks began to appear over the legitimacy of that fee collection policy.In the end, the Lords passed the clause which would have struck out the pre-1910 rights.

But property interests in the Commons pressured the board into withdrawing the provision.

The bill received royal assent at the beginning of this year, five years after first being b rought before parliament.Following the BWB's climbdown, Mr Grazebrook has been inundated with instructions from mooring owners who had paid extra connection charges and who are now contemplating action to recover them.

And many of Mr Grazebrook's clients have simply stopped paying connecting charges and have not been pursued by the board.Mr Grazebrook explains: 'One client ceased paying nearly two years ago -- has not paid a bean and has not been chased.

I know the board are extremely cross about it and somewhat embarrassed, but presumably they do not feel in a strong enough position to sue.'Strong judicial backing for Mr Grazebrook's view came earlier this year from the High Court in the form of the Swan Hill case.

In that action, a development company successfully sued the BWB over bridging rights.

'In many ways,' says Mr Grazebrook, 'it confirmed what I have been saying publicly without judicial support for the last two years: that these old provisions are as valid and effective today as they were in 1794.'Mr Grazebrook's clients are not by any means all large corporate developers.

In fact, he describes most as small business owners, in many cases struggling for financial survival.The Shakespeares waterways team is still a relatively small unit which, over the last three years, has provided about £100,000 worth of turnover for the firm.

Mr Grazebrook, who is primarily a private client solicitor, devotes about 25% of his time to waterways work.

He is assisted by a couple of lawyers from the firm's litigation and property departments as and when they are required.Canal law, maintains Mr Grazebrook, 'will generate an increasing amount of work [for the firm] because a lot of it involves the old statutes which are not readily available, and the BWB regime is not known and understood by many solicitors'.

And working in the team's favour is the increasing popularity of the canals for recreational boating.

More than 10,000 boats float past Mr Grazebrook's home annually, and some canals are busier now with leisure trade than they were during their industrial transport heyday.