Leisure and work on the water
It is not necessary to leave London in order to take a long traffic-free walk. The towpath of the Regent’s Canal, which runs over eight miles from Paddington Station to the Thames, fits the bill. The contrasting scenes of nature and industry, leisure and work, which accompany this canal walk already characterised the waterway when it opened in 1816.
The Grand Union Canal transported goods from the Midlands to Paddington. From the canal basin there, the Regent’s Canal curved eastward in a great arc to the docks on the Thames, passing around Regent’s Park and the high-class residential district that was being built there. Fine ladies out for a stroll were shocked by the bargemen’s foul language, and the canal traffic was even a hazard: in 1874 a boat laden with gunpowder exploded and destroyed a bridge at the north end of the park.
Info
Address Little Venice: Warwick Crescent, W2 6NE | Public Transport Paddington (Bakerloo, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City Line) | Tip The London Canal Museum (12–13 New Wharf Road, Tue–Sun 10am–4.30pm; Tube: King’s Cross) tells the story of the canal in a former ice store.
Today, this stretch of the canal presents an attractive sight. At the canal basin in Little Venice, colourful narrowboats rock gently at their moorings. Bicycles, firewood, and even miniature vegetable gardens on the boats’ roofs give clues to the lifestyle of the individualists who live aboard. Tourist boats take the short trip through a green cutting, passing London Zoo on the way to the markets and locks at Camden Town.
The stretch of canal to the east of Camden locks shows the change from dilapidated industrial sites to expensive housing. Commercial traffic on the canal ceased in the late 1960s. Cycling commuters have now taken the place of barge horses on the towpath. In King’s Place to the north of King’s Cross Station, a new waterside cultural quarter has sprung up. Elsewhere, old warehouses have been converted into apartments, but traces of decay remain, and with them, the feeling that you are seeing London from its untidy back yard, until at Limehouse Basin the Thames is reached, and expensive motor yachts line the quayside.
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