London

LONDON

Each time I have visited London in the past, I have been told that I should go for a trip in a canal boat on the Regent's Canal so this time I was determined that I really had to try to do this. Since I had not taken into the account the off season timetables which came into effect from the 1st October (I was there on the 2nd !) I had an hour and a half to wait before the next boat departed - just enough time for a leisurely lunch in a restaurant on the banks of the canal while watching the various waterbirds begging for food from the few tourists still in the area.

The canal boat arrived right on time and I was so pleased to see that while the sides of the passenger section were open to the weather, we did have a roof above us to provide some shelter from the rain. So leaving the seagull behind to scavenge from the next lot of tourists.......

.....we headed off at the start of a 45 minute cruise towards Camden Town, passing by numerous canal boats which are the permanent homes of a lot of people who had gone to a great deal of trouble to make their boats as attractive as possible.

This one was a long way from home in canal boat terms. These boats can cruise all over the country through the network of canals which were built for the purpose of transporting all kinds of goods and merchandise in days gone by but since the maximum speed allowed is 4 mph, you had better not be in a hurry to get there.

Just along the canal from the restaurant we came to Little Venice where the canal broadens out to allow the boats to turn around and has a lot of moorings available to the permanent residents who pay an annual rental for the privilege and an area where owners can tie up for a maximum of two weeks free of charge.

The Macclesfield Bridge is known as the Gunpowder Bridge since a barge load of gunpowder exploded underneath it in 1874 and blew it to pieces. Now rebuilt, the name has stuck.

Another bridge a little further along - you can see from the umbrellas that the weather hadn't improved ! During my trip to Wales for the Photo Workshops I had had a lot of help and advice on how to use the manual settings on my camera so on this trip I decided to try out some of my newly acquired 'skills' ! While some of the images in this section of the blog do not appear to be well focussed, I love the 'old world' painted look of especially this one and the ones of the tunnel exit later in this section.

Some of the Regents Park houses along the banks of the canal are very large and very expensive with the guide telling us that one house in particular was valued at at least 30 million pounds. The majority of them were either hidden by trees or the photos were not good enough to be posted here - perhaps on my next trip I will be fortunate enough to have good weather conditions for my photography.

The oriental building below is a Chinese restaurant built on a barge in Regent's Park.At the Camden Town end of the canal is the Pirate Castle Club - a youth club which has its own canal barges which would delight any child interested in boating.

At the Camden Town end of the canal is the Pirate Castle Club - a youth club which has its own canal barges which would delight any child interested in boating.

At last we reached Camden Town and the St. Pancras' Basin which was the end of cruise. Since it was still raining heavily and late in the afternoon, I decided to stay on the boat and make the return trip straight away which gave me an opportunity to photograph parts of the canal that I had missed.