Cruise from Little Venice to Camden Market
Cruise
from Little Venice to Camden Market
Little Venice to Camden Town by barge, along the Grand Union
Canal (seasonal)
To journey by the canal is to see a place from an entirely different
perspective, and this short trip, about twenty minutes, is no exception. It
starts in Little Venice, with its respectable, fashionable villas and
houseboats; dives into a tunnel; comes up briefly for air in an estate of
low-cost housing; then goes back under a bridge, and immediately you are among
millionaires' mansions on the edge of Regent's Park. Beyond them is the
tranquillity of the park in a deep cutting with overhanging trees. The canal bisects
the London Zoo; we saw gazelles and heard the squawk of tropical birds. Just
after the Zoo, the barge takes a sharp left turn by a floating Chinese
restaurant before arriving in Camden.
The barge drops
you right at the centre of the Camden market. The day we went, there was a
cloudless sky with bright sharp sunlight, so that the arrival at the crowded market,
with is bright colours and exotic smells, owed more to a Conrad arrival at some
riverside town on the Congo than to a North London market.
Charles Marsden-Smedley
Charles Marsden-Smedley's design practice specialises in
museum and exhibition design.
