Little Venice: Londra e il suo sistema di canali

A nord di Londra, oltre i binari della ferrovia che porta alla stazione di Paddington, c'è una piccola area dove si incontrano due corsi d'acqua che attraversano la capitale inglese: il Grand Union Canal e il Regent's Canal. È la Little Venice di Londra, un'oasi di pace off the beaten track. Camminiamo lungo il canale, fiancheggiato da alberi e case incantevoli, passando per Regent's Park e finendo a Camden Town.

PICCOLA VENEZIA A LONDRA: UN PERCORSO DA PADDINGTON A CAMDEN TOWN

London may not be Venice, but it does have an impressive canal system. In fact, it has an area that is called “Little Venice”. According to one version of events, it was given this name by the Victorian poet Robert Browning. According to another, it was an earlier poet, Lord Byron, who first the idea.

Little Venice marks the division between the Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal, which goes all the way to Birmingham and the Midlands, and the Regent’s Canal, which goes down to the old London docks at the Limehouse Basin, on the River Thames in the East End.

REGENCY

The story of the name of the Regent’s Canal is less complicated. It is in honour of the Prince Regent, who became acting head of state in 1810, when his father, George III, went mad. At the time, the Industrial Revolution was getting underway and the canal system was built to carry goods to and from London, as well as to and from other important cities. The first section of the Regent’s Canal opened in 1816. This ran from Little Venice to Camden Lock and that is the section we walked along with Geoff Marshall (see interview).

The rest of the Canal, from Camden Lock to the Limehouse Basin, opened in 1820, the year that George III died and the Prince Regent became George IV. Walking along the Regent’s Canal is always enjoyable, but if you want to see plenty of boats in action, then the IWA (Inland Waterways Association) Canalway Cavalcade at the end of April is the time to go.

A Walk Along the Water

Visitors to London know the River Thames, but they might not know another stretch of water, the Regent’s Canal. This runs from Little Venice, in Maida Vale, to the Limehouse Basin in the East End, and it passes through some interesting areas. We decided to walk along part of it in the company of Geoff Marshall, a video journalist and canal enthusiast. We started at Little Venice and walked in a northeasterly direction towards Regent’s Park. We stopped for a break when we got to the sixth bridge.

Geoff Marshall (standard British accent): We’re standing directly beneath the Metropolitan Line. We’re at bridge number six, the bridges are numbered sequentially, starting with the first one right at Little Venice, going all the way down to Limehouse. Any time the railway now crosses the canal, I think is nice because it was the railways that actually destroyed the canals and brought to the (an) end their business because they could carry goods a lot further and a lot quicker and in huger quantities too, so when you have a railway crossing the canal, it’s like where the two worlds collide.

Here at bridges five and six you’ve got the Chiltern main line, in and out of Marylebone, and then you’ve got the Metropolitan Line here, which we’re stood directly under right now, and you can look up through the gaps in the iron bridge. I don’t know, if I was a little bit taller I could probably sort of reach out and touch the bottom of the train; you’re that close to it. Here goes a northbound one, just… he’s on his way into Baker Street!

TAKEAWAY

We then walked through the northern section of Regent’s Park, passing the Islamic Cultural Centre and London Zoo.

Geoff Marshall: I do love the canal. I love that it’s peaceful, to use a cliché, it’s a tranquil backwater, and A Walk Along the Water obviously it literally is a backwater, it is water. In the background you can hear the rumble of traffic, and I get a little tiny bit of joy when you have that moment where you’re walking along a busy road or pavement and then suddenly you think, “Oh, what’s over this wall? What’s round this path?” and you go down a little path and there’s some steps and there’s the canal just sitting there, which is very peaceful, people coming by with their children and their buggies, or it’s a place for joggers to come along, some people cycle along here.

At the moment we’ve been heading east along the top of Regent’s Park, and we’ve got to a point that’s called the Cumberland Spur, and the canal actually splits here and behind us there’s this floating red construction. It’s a three-level construction, it’s a boat, it’s a double-width barge, but it’s actually a Chinese restaurant, it’s the Feng Shui floating Chinese restaurant. And rumour has it – I’ve never seen it done – you obviously access it, there’s a bridge from the pavement out, to the third storey up, to enter the restaurant from the roadside – but rumour has that it you can place an order, you can call them up, and then you can approach the restaurant boatside and they’ll hand you your order out of a window onto your boat, so it literally is a Chinese boat takeaway, on the floating water.

TIME FOR A TATTOO?

Our final section took us to Camden Lock.

Geoff Marshall: So we’re approaching Camden Lock, and the interesting fact about Camden Lock is that the lock, as in the actual physical lock gates that are at Camden, aren’t called Camden Lock. It’s called the Hampstead Lock, but the area, colloquially, has just become known as Camden Lock. Nowadays it’s become a very cool, characterful – I’d say Shoreditch in East London is hipster – so this is a little bit more hippy. If you want to get a tattoo, you want to get a piercing, come to Camden. It’s definitely a little relaxed community here, but I love it.

There’s a nice little café, and one of my favourite sort of summer things to do is to come and be at Camden Lock in the café at sunset, as the sun’s going down on a nice summer’s evening and just sort of doing a bit of people-watching, watch the canal boats come by, watching somebody operate the lock gates with the lock handles, that’s always a fun thing to do. So, yeah, I do like Camden, specifically where the canal passes through it, a lot, in London: there (it’s) a very, very nice place indeed.