The Regent's Canal is the oldest piece of large-scale engineering in this part of NW1, and much of the character of the streets between Regent's Park and Camden follows from it. It was cut as a commercial waterway, carried coal, timber and building materials for well over a century, and has spent the last fifty years being walked rather than worked.
Nash's canal and the road to Limehouse
The Regent's Canal Company was created by an Act of Parliament in 1812 to link the Grand Junction Canal's Paddington arm with the Thames at Limehouse. The architect John Nash was one of its directors, and the canal was folded into his wider scheme for the Prince Regent's new park; the Prince allowed his title to be used for it. Detailed engineering was left to Nash's assistant James Morgan, who became the company's chief engineer — a familiar arrangement on Nash projects.
Digging began in 1812. The canal opened in two stages: the stretch from Paddington to Camden Town in 1816, and the remainder, dropping east and south to the Thames, in 1820. End to end it runs about eight and a half miles through a series of locks, the first of which, heading east, are the Hampstead Road Locks at Camden.
The stretch below Primrose Hill
East of Little Venice the canal curves round the northern edge of Regent's Park, passes through London Zoo and skirts the foot of Primrose Hill before reaching Camden. For walkers this is the most theatrical section of the whole waterway: cuttings, high garden walls, elaborate bridges and the zoo's enclosures on either bank. It is worth knowing that the towpath does not continue through the canal's tunnels, so anyone walking the full line has to climb to street level and rejoin the water beyond them.
One vanished feature is worth looking for. A branch called the Cumberland Arm, authorised in 1813, once ran south from the main line to a basin serving Cumberland Market. It was filled in during the early 1940s, largely with rubble from bombed houses, and the site became allotments. Only a short stub survives at the junction, used for moorings and occupied by a floating restaurant.
The morning the bridge blew up
Shortly before five o'clock on the morning of 2 October 1874, a steam tug was hauling a train of barges past the zoo. One of them, the Tilbury, carried a mixed cargo that included sugar, coffee, nuts, petroleum and gunpowder bound for a quarry in the Midlands. As it passed beneath Macclesfield Bridge the gunpowder ignited. The four people aboard were killed, the barge was destroyed and the bridge was reduced to rubble. Windows were smashed and roofs damaged across the surrounding streets, and the explosion was reported to have been heard many miles away.
The bridge was rebuilt from what could be salvaged, and has been known ever since as the Blow-Up Bridge. It is often pointed out that the surviving iron columns were re-erected the other way round, so that the grooves cut into them by generations of towing ropes now face away from the water — an appealing story, and one repeated by most local guides, though it is easier to see than to document. Parliament passed the Explosives Act the following year, tightening the rules on making, storing, selling and carrying explosives.
From working water to walking route
The canal never earned what its promoters hoped; the railways took the long-distance traffic within a generation of its opening, and the last commercial carrying ended in the early 1970s. Its second life began almost immediately. In 1974 a temporary market was set up beside the lock at Camden, on a site of former canal warehouses that had been left in limbo by a proposal to drive an urban motorway through it. The road scheme was abandoned in 1976; the market stayed, and became the best-known thing about Camden Town. In 1977 the Pirate Castle, a mock-fortified boating and canoeing centre for local young people designed by Richard Seifert and Partners, opened on the bank close by.
What to look for on the towpath
Walking west from Camden towards Little Venice, or east towards King's Cross, the canal's working past is still legible in small details:
- Rope grooves worn into bridge ironwork and stonework by decades of towlines.
- Lock gear and side ponds at Hampstead Road, where the canal begins its descent to the Thames.
- Warehouse and stable buildings around Camden Lock, adapted rather than replaced.
- Bridge numbers and company plates, the surviving administrative furniture of a private canal company.
- Moorings and residential boats, a use the original proprietors would not have recognised at all.