Exploring London by boat

Today I travelled from Paddington basin to Limehouse basin.  The route, along the Regent's canal, provides an amazing sampler of very varied areas of London.  The roll call of places visited is itself a litany of the variety of London:- Paddington, Little Venice, Maida Vale, Marylebone, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, Camden, Kentish Town, St Pancras, King's Cross, Pentonville, Islington, Shoreditch, Haggerston (I had never even hard of this one before), Bethnal Green, South Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Mile End, Stepney, Limehouse.  And at the end it delivers this view, from my kitchen window.

The first part of the run is very attractive - Nash designed houses, a lot of vegetation, well set up gardens and houses, the zoo, and virtually no boat traffic.  Though the footpath is well used, by comparison with the Paddington basin, and the far end of the route there were far fewer people using the footpath.  When I got to Camden, there was a mass of people there, viewing my operating the locks as part of their Sunday morning entertainment, but again there were far fewer than I had anticipated.  After this the use of the towpath was very heavy, all the way down to Limehouse.

The locks are in pretty poor condition and the access for working the boat is quite difficult.  At one of the locks, the approach was blocked by two boats on the waterpoint by the lock, and I had to gain access to the lock over them.  On the way back, I may try to go slowly, and take some photos, but working the boat tends to make it difficult to sensibly use the camera; and vica versa.  Limehouse basin is currently housing a very wide variety of boats, including a "gin palace" that would not feel out of place in Monaco.  

Over the last couple of decades I have been down to Canary Wharf on a couple of occasions for business meetings, but the last time I was in this area, able to look and see what the place is like, it was to visit a friend who then lived in the Isle of Dogs.  This was before any of the Canary Wharf development, and the Isle of Dogs then was the bleakest urban landscape I have ever seen (including the 60's tower block redevelopment of Glasgow).  Now of course, there are expensive apartments, huge office developments, and massive amounts of new developments.  It is an attractive piece of urban landscape, that seems to work, and forms a living and vital  community.

All in all, a good day.