Regent's Canal

History

The walk follows the towpath of the Regent's Canal from Paddington to Limehouse. The lawyer and businessman Thomas Homer proposed the canal in 1802, to link the Grand Junction Canal at Paddington with a dock planned at Limehouse on the Thames, and John Nash, the architect of Regent's Park, was a driving force behind it. The Regent's Canal Company was formed in 1812 and building began that year; delays, disputes with landowners and money problems followed, and the canal was completed in 1820 at a cost of £772,000, about twice the first estimate. It was built too close to the start of the railway age to be financially successful, and at one stage it only narrowly escaped being turned into a railway.

With the Grand Junction Canal and the routes to the Midlands and the north, it carried timber, coal, ice, building materials and food into and out of London, and long-distance traffic used it into the 1960s. Its last horse-drawn cargo came in 1956. The canal was nationalised in 1948, and the Regent's Canal Dock where it meets the Thames, now Limehouse Basin, closed to shipping in 1969. In 1979 the British Waterways Board allowed electricity cables to be laid in a trough below the towpath between St John's Wood and City Road. The Canal & River Trust now describes its towpaths here as routes for walkers and cyclists.