Reading the Regent's Canal

Walks along the Regent's Canal begin, for me, to the east of central London, at Limehouse Basin. A hundred years ago this was the Regent's Canal Dock, where ships eased through a lock from the Thames, tied up, and offloaded their cargoes of coal or timber into wagons, or into barges for transport onward into the capital. As displays at the small Canal Museum just behind King's Cross Station will tell you, another cargo was ice, imported from the Baltic states, barged to King's Cross and stored in brick-lined pits for use in Victorian ice-cream-making establishments. Documentary films from the 1920s screened in an endless loop at the Museum reveal Regent's Canal Dock as a wilderness of masts through which draft horses pull barges slowly and silently across the grimy water while cloth-capped bargees nudge tillers back and forth against a backdrop of warehouses. All that is gone. On my way around the basin, now a marina filled with yachts and residential narrowboats, I pass the UltraSmile cosmetic dentistry practice and an art gallery, then, paralleling the Docklands Light Railway viaduct and crossing a smart little pedestrian bridge, I reach the lock between basin and canal. From here it is an eight-and-a-half-mile walk on the canal towpath north through Mile End, Islington, King's Cross, and Camden, then west across Regent's Park to Little Venice in Paddington. From Little Venice a short branch diverges south toward Paddington Station, while the much longer Grand Union Canal heads west toward the water transport system of the English Midlands. The Regent's Canal was intended to and still does bring the Thames into watery contact with, say, Birmingham.

On one morning's towpath stroll, toward the end of what had been an unusually mild winter in London, I stopped to watch a pair of coots getting their spring going early, the male fetching scraps of reed for his nest-building mate already settled into a cattail thicket, neither of them bothered by or even noticing my presence. No sign of the fauna T. S. Eliot mentions in The Waste Land, where canals are rendered as watery slums,

A rat crept softly through the vegetation,Dragging its slimy belly on the bank,

though I suspect rats do creep about somewhere here, unless urban foxes succeed in keeping them down. Noting my interest in birds, a fellow stroller advised keeping a lookout for a pair of swans frequenting this stretch of water, and a few yards along the pair flew in right on cue, splashed noisily down, and resumed the graceful swanning about they do so well. They paddled up to me, looking for a handout. The birds' half-domesticated tameness sorts with the peculiar nature of the Canal, half genuinely natural, an extended wildlife corridor complete with dense tangles of berry vines as well as cattails, and half a manmade construct, a masterpiece of 19^th-century waterways engineering.

The engineering aspect comes to the fore as you pass by locks, 12 of them all told on the Canal, invariably the old-fashioned miter type, with gates joined at an angle pointing upstream against the sluggish current, so that water pressure helps seal them shut—the same ingenious design found in human heart valves. The locks lift boats up the 86-foot gradient between the Thames and Little Venice and were originally all double, that is, provided with side-by-side lifting chambers to speed two-way barge traffic through. Now most have been converted to single locks with a weir. Once I lingered to watch two narrowboats passing downstream through Salmon Lane Lock, one after the other, their owners leaning hard against the massive beams which lever open the upstream gates, then guiding the boats into the lock, tying them up temporarily, using a hand crank to raise the underwater doors which drain water out and lower its level within the lock, then finally opening the downstream gates and releasing the boats back into the Canal . . . a little ballet of purposeful activity, a demonstration of...