This paper treats the two-dimensional steady flow of a viscous incompressible fluid driven through a channel bounded by two walls which are the radii of a sector and two arcs (the ‘inlet’ and ‘outlet’), with the same centre as the sector, at which inflow and outflow conditions are imposed. The computed flows are related to both a laboratory experiment and recent calculations of the linearized ‘spatial’ modes of Jeffery–Hamel flows. The computations, at a few values of the angle between the walls of the sector and several values of the Reynolds number, show how the first bifurcation of the flow in a channel is related to spatial instability. They also show how the end effects due to conditions at the inlet and outlet of the channel are related to the spatial modes: in particular, Saint-Venant's principle breaks down when the flow is spatially unstable, there being a temporally stable steady flow for which small changes at the inlet or outlet create substantial effects all along the channel. The choice of a sector as the shape of the channel is to permit the exploitation of knowledge of the spatial modes of Jeffery–Hamel flows, although we regard the sector as an example of channels with walls of moderate curvature.