Canals and Waterways | This Is London Town | Abbey Court's Tourist Guide

Canals and Waterways

Few Londoners are more than dimly aware of London’s alternative water route, the canals that bisect the north of the city in a lazy arc from Limehouse to Uxbridge. The Regent’s Canal was constructed between 1812 and 1820 by Irish, Welsh and Scots navies, hard working, hard drinking men whose feisty nature resulted in segregated drinking dens, as seen by the three Castles of Camden, the Dublin, Pembroke and Edinburgh (it is also said this trio of pubs was named for the railway navies who moved to the area). The Regent’s Canal met the national network of Paddington where it joined the Grand Union and swept westwards to Uxbridge, Birmingham and beyond. For a time, this was the city’s premier industrial transport system, but the arrival of the railways soon scuppered that. In 1845 the first bid was made to drain the canal and turn it into a railway.

For visitors taking a trip along the canal offers an unusual window on London: greenery in Hackney, industrial wasteland in St John’s Wood, the gull-covered island where Browning is said to have written poetry, cricket bat factories in the shadow of Lord’s, gnome-filled canalside gardens in Kensal Rise, a dark mile-long tunnel in Islington…It’s a world apart, but with a diversity and denseness of history that makes it very much a part of London life.

Although it is accessible to all - many take the pleasant stroll from Camden to Little Venice - its secrets are best known by those who live aboard the narrow boats that line thetowpath.

Grand Union Canal is the motorway of the canal network, the longest and widest single canal in Britain. An amalgamation of three historic canals, it joins the Thames at Brentford and snakes through 137 miles and 166 locks to Birmingham, while another branch flows through Leicester and joins the Soar and Trent.

At the other end, the Grand Union flows through West London, branching off to join the Regent’s Canal and down to meet the Thames at Brentford.

No longer a busy commercial route, the Grand Union is beloved by boaters for its variety – from the city centres of London and Birmingham to the Chiltern Hills and villages of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.

The first section of the canal opened in 1796 and the through route to Brentford was finally opened in August 1805. The Grand Union was an immediate commercial success, but suffered competition from the railways after the London to Birmingham line opened in 1838.

As the canals declined commercially in the next century, pleasure boating took over. In 1931 the Grand Union announced a plan to convert the entire London to Birmingham network to broad beam, something it had been trying to convince other canal owners to do for 125 years. If the plan had succeeded we might still have a working commercial canal system, as on the Continent, but the money ran out, leaving us with the narrow canal network so beloved by boaters today.