London Notes: Part 5 - canals

This is my last post on London proper and not just its restaurants for a while as, well, I no longer live in London.  My few brief posts on the London I love so much have been the posts I enjoyed writing the most but they have also been the ones that have required the most effort, the actual thinking about the writing, the dedicated trips to get pictures.  And there was so much more I wanted to say.  There may one day be further entries and if they did come they would revel in the views from Crystal Palace, the Inns of Court, fry-ups in formica cafes, Columbia Road Flower market, the glory of London's parks, the art scenes in Deptford, Peckham and New Cross and a (cheating) guide to punting in Cambridge.

This final "London Note" is on London's canals which admittedly are not as grungy as New York's Gowanus Canal or as glamorous as the Canal du Saint Martin in Paris and aren't as resplendent or as prevalent as everywhere in Venice.  Still, they just sit there in the background, hidden away below road level or under bridges, tucked at the edges of parks or at the backs of expensive rows of houses. And they provide the perfect retreat from what London is now and a glimpse back to a canal barge and coal ferrying industrial past.

There is no real point to London's canals but yet they have somehow become vital to the city. Cyclists and commuters use Regent's Canal to cut from the East to the West for work. They serve as secret arteries to places like Broadway market and Angel where you don't have to be distracted by cars or roads, just the slow plod up the foodpath. And on weekends people wander up and down them with no real destination in mind.

There is also something attractive about their relative unkeptness and industrial nature in a city that is so gentrified, where every square inch has some bargain basement Tescofied newbuild pile of crap stuffed on it. The canals are covered with grafitti, there are decaying buildings everywhere as soon as you move out of central London and in the summer people just sprawl on the concrete drinking as hard as they humanly can.

Due to their relative dinginess they remain interesting. There is grafitti up and down them and as you get up to Hackney Wick and the future Olympic site it becomes ever present. At the moment the Banksy / Robbo fight is currently being played out and you can see Banksy tags defaced / amended by Robbo in a game of one upmanship. All of this makes it fun and a canvas for expressions of discontent by London's youth.

One of my greatest joys is running them at night. On a long day after work you can sprint up the canal beginning in the hipster beginnings of Kingsland Road until you reach where it adjoins parks like London Fields and Victoria Park and you are left to run in utter blackness, just the vague outline of trees to the left and canal boats to the right. Then if you keep pushing round to the East you comeupon a view of Canary Wharf rising out of the night and floating above the canal that is simply beautiful.

For my other failed attempts to put down what I will so miss about London look here.