Rated on atmosphere, coffee stops, how lost you might get, and the feeling of having quietly outsmarted the city. London’s canals are its best-kept secret and its most under-used asset. Here is where to walk them.
London has roughly a hundred miles of navigable waterway and most people who live here have walked almost none of it. The canal network was built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to carry coal and timber and goods across a city that had no other way to move heavy things efficiently. By the time the railways arrived and made it obsolete, the canals had already shaped the neighbourhoods around them. The warehouses are mostly flats now. The wharves are mostly restaurants. But the water is still there, and the towpaths are still mostly flat, and on a good day walking beside them is one of the best things you can do in this city.
The ranking below is opinionated and deliberately so. A canal walk that passes through beautiful surroundings and ends at a good pub is objectively better than one that does not.
Little Venice to Camden Lock
Regent’s Canal · Maida Vale to Camden Town
Distance 3 miles
Time 1 to 2 hours
Start Warwick Avenue tube
End Camden Town tube
This is the one. If you walk no other canal in London, walk this. It starts at Little Venice, the triangular pool at Browning’s Island where the Regent’s Canal meets the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal, and it ends at Camden Lock. Almost nothing about it is difficult or unpleasant. The towpath is flat, the houseboats are beautiful, the trees lean over the water in both directions and in summer the whole thing is dappled and green and improbably quiet given that you are threading through the middle of one of the world’s busiest cities.
The name Little Venice was apparently coined by Robert Browning, who lived on nearby Warwick Crescent in the 1860s, though no one is entirely certain of this. Lord Byron is also credited with an earlier comparison. It does not matter who coined it: the name stuck because there is something to it. The wide pool, the houseboats, the white stuccoed mansions behind them, the slightly theatrical calm of the whole scene. It is not Venice, but it is unusual enough that standing there feels like a small discovery every time, even if you have done it before.
From Little Venice you follow the towpath east. The canal runs under the Maida Hill Tunnel, where you briefly rejoin the street before descending back to the water. Then come the back gardens of Regent’s Park, and the wire mesh fence of London Zoo through which you can see, depending on the season, the Snowdon Aviary, the painted wolves and sometimes a warthog or two going about its day. The Zoo section is delightful and costs nothing. Shortly after comes Primrose Hill Road and then the final approach to Camden Lock, where the canal widens and the market begins and the spell of quietness is broken by the noise and energy of one of London’s most chaotic public spaces.
The contrast between the two ends of this walk is much of what makes it work. You start in studied, affluent calm and you end in a market that smells of incense and jerk chicken and sells things you did not know existed. The walk between them is the transition and it handles the transition gracefully. Coffee at the Waterside Café at Little Venice before you set off. Anything at all at Camden Lock when you arrive.
Hackney Wick to Broadway Market
Regent’s Canal · Hackney Wick to London Fields
Distance 2.5 miles
Time 1 hour
Start Hackney Wick Overground
End London Fields Overground
The eastern section of the Regent’s Canal is a completely different walk from the western section and it should be thought of as such. Where Little Venice to Camden is refined and leafy and feels like a discovery, Hackney Wick to Broadway Market is scrappier and more interesting and feels like the actual east London that exists when nobody is performing it for an audience.
Start at Hackney Wick Overground station, which deposits you into a neighbourhood that has been remade over the past fifteen years from industrial wasteland into something genuinely creative and occasionally brilliant. Crate Brewery is right on the canal and serves excellent pizza and craft beer in a former printing warehouse. Barge East is a 115-year-old Dutch cargo barge that has expanded to include an airstream bar, a beer garden and a small farm where they grow ingredients. The Yard Theatre is fifty metres away. GROW stages live jazz on a floating canal pontoon. All of this is within a few minutes of the Overground and most of it is on or immediately adjacent to the towpath.
Walk west along the canal from Hackney Wick and you pass through a landscape of large-format graffiti murals, former factories converting slowly into creative workspace, occasional herons standing on the bank with the fixed intensity of professionals. The canal curves through Victoria Park’s northern edge, passing the elegant Old Ford Lock with its Grade II listed cottages and stables. By the time you reach London Fields the neighbourhood has shifted again: coffee shops have replaced breweries, and Broadway Market on a Saturday is one of the best street markets in London, full of good cheese and independent food vendors and the pleasant chaos of people genuinely enjoying themselves outdoors.
Do this on a Saturday so you arrive at Broadway Market when it is running. Do it in the morning so you have the breweries on the way out and the market on the way in.
King’s Cross to Islington and Back
Regent’s Canal · Granary Square to New North Road
Distance 2 miles each way
Time 1 to 1.5 hours
Start and End King’s Cross St Pancras tube
Best as An out-and-back or one-way
Granary Square at King’s Cross is one of the most successful pieces of urban regeneration in recent London history and it sits directly on the Regent’s Canal. Coal Drops Yard, the Victorian coal storage buildings that have been converted into a shopping and restaurant destination by Heatherwick Studio, is immediately adjacent. The canal here looks as though someone decided it should be the most photogenic stretch of water in the city and worked backwards from that ambition.
Head east from Granary Square along the towpath toward Islington and the walk quickly changes character. Within a few minutes the regenerated grandeur of King’s Cross gives way to narrower, quieter stretches of canal with overhanging trees and the backs of older buildings. The towpath passes under a succession of Victorian bridges, each one a slightly different shade of brick. Eventually you reach the Islington Tunnel, where the canal disappears underground for 886 metres. You are obliged to leave the towpath here and walk along the top, through the streets of Islington, until you can rejoin the water on the other side.
The tunnel walk is a detour that runs through genuinely pleasant Islington streets. Chapel Market, just north of the Angel, is one of the few genuinely old-fashioned street markets left in inner London and it is right on the route above the tunnel. Return the same way or continue east toward Haggerston and Hackney Wick, where the walk connects with the route above.
Start with coffee at The Lighterman, which has an excellent terrace directly on the canal at Granary Square. In winter this whole stretch is particularly atmospheric in the early evening when the restaurants and bars around Coal Drops Yard are lit up and the canal reflects everything.
Lee Navigation: Hackney Wick to Springfield Park
River Lee Navigation · Hackney Wick to Clapton
Distance 4 miles
Time 1.5 to 2 hours
Start Hackney Wick Overground
End Clapton Overground
The River Lee Navigation is not the Regent’s Canal. It is wider, less groomed, quieter and in many stretches it looks less like London than like somewhere a long way from a city. This is its great virtue. When you walk north from Hackney Wick along the towpath, you pass through Hackney Marshes, one of the largest areas of natural floodplain remaining in inner London, and then through Walthamstow Marshes, which is a nature reserve that contains some of the last surviving traditional marshland in the capital. In summer there are cattle grazing on the marsh. There are herons everywhere. The Lee Navigation runs parallel to the natural River Lea and the two waterways create a green corridor that feels genuinely remote from the city despite being entirely within it.
The walk up to Springfield Park, which sits on a hill above the Navigation at Clapton with views back south over the water, is the right endpoint for a half-day version of this route. Springfield Park itself is one of the best parks in east London and has a good café at the top overlooking the water. The Lilla Flicka Bakery, a bakery operating from a renovated barge on the Navigation at Upper Clapton, opens on weekends and is worth planning your arrival time around.
Wear shoes that can handle mud. This is not a canal walk you do in city shoes after lunch. Go on a weekday morning in spring or autumn when the light is good and the path is yours. This is the walk you do when you need to remember that London is not entirely concrete.
Paddington Basin to Little Venice
Grand Union Canal · Paddington to Maida Vale
Distance 1 mile
Time 30 to 45 minutes
Start Paddington station
End Warwick Avenue tube or vice versa
This is the shortest walk on the list and the one with the most dramatic change in atmosphere over the smallest distance. Paddington Basin, immediately west of Paddington station, is glass and steel and regenerated waterfront and very much the twenty-first century. The Rolling Bridge by Heatherwick Studio curls itself into an octagon on certain days of the week. There is a floating café called Darcie Green on a narrowboat, serving good brunch. There are public art installations and office buildings and the general energy of a development that has recently been finished and is quietly pleased with itself.
Walk fifteen minutes west along the canal toward Little Venice and all of that drops away. You are suddenly in a neighbourhood of white stuccoed mansions and residential narrowboats and people walking dogs in the early morning with no particular urgency. The contrast is startling and deliberate. This short stretch of canal contains more architectural variety than most walks three times its length.
This is the walk for people who have arrived at Paddington for a train, have forty-five minutes to spare, and want to see something genuinely good. It is also the walk for people who want to start their Little Venice to Camden journey but want to arrive at Little Venice feeling like they have already been somewhere, rather than simply stepping off the Tube.
Hertford Union Canal Circular
Hertford Union Canal · Victoria Park to Hackney Wick
Distance 3 miles
Time 1 to 1.5 hours
Start and End Bethnal Green tube or Hackney Wick Overground
Best as A circular via Victoria Park
The Hertford Union Canal is only a mile long. It was built in 1830 to connect the Regent’s Canal to the Lee Navigation and it looks like what it is: a short, purposeful piece of industrial waterway that has aged quietly and well. Walk it as part of a circular route that takes in the northern edge of Victoria Park and you have one of the most satisfying compact canal walks in London.
Victoria Park itself is the best large park in east London. The boating lake, the bandstands, the cafe pavilion, the specific quality of east Londoners using a park on a Saturday morning with genuine enthusiasm all make it a pleasure to move through. Entering it from the Hertford Union Canal towpath, which runs along its northern boundary, is a better way in than the main gates. Old Ford Lock, with its Grade II listed cottage and stables at the point where the Hertford Union meets the Regent’s Canal, is worth pausing at. The lock keeper’s cottage has been here since 1830 and looks it, in the best possible way.
This is the walk you do when you have a couple of hours on a Sunday morning and want to combine a proper park with a canal and end up back where you started. It is also the walk that makes the most sense before or after spending time in Hackney Wick, because the contrast between the Hertford Union’s quietness and the energy of the Wick is particularly satisfying.
Grand Union Canal: Kensal Green to Little Venice
Grand Union Canal · Kensal Green to Maida Vale
Distance 2.5 miles
Time 1 hour
Start Kensal Green tube
End Warwick Avenue tube
This stretch of the Grand Union Canal is less visited than any route above it on this list and that is its main quality. Walk east from Kensal Green and you are on a wide, tree-lined towpath that passes through the back of a neighbourhood that most Londoners have never explored properly. The canal here passes under the Kensal Green Cemetery wall, and there is something particular about walking alongside a Victorian cemetery with the water on one side and the elaborate stonework of nineteenth-century funerary architecture on the other. It is a combination that produces a very specific kind of reflective quiet.
The towpath continues through Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park before the canal narrows slightly and the character shifts toward the approach to Little Venice. The boats here tend to be lived on rather than tourist attractions. The mooring gardens are tended with more effort than you would expect from people who live on water. This is working canal life rather than heritage canal life and it makes the walk feel genuinely functional rather than curated.
This route earns its place on the list because it is the walk you recommend to people who think they have already done all the canal walks. Most of them have not walked this one. It is entirely without fuss and all the better for it.
A general note applicable to all of these routes: cyclists on the towpath move faster than you expect and announce themselves less than they should. They are not going anywhere and neither are you, but assume they are there and keep to the left. Also: the towpaths close intermittently for maintenance and the Canal and River Trust website is worth checking before any walk longer than two miles if you want to avoid a detour. Beyond that, the only rule is to go when the weather is reasonable and stay longer than you planned.