Why London’s canals are the place to be this summer

It’s aperitivo hour on a balmy summer’s evening and I’m sitting on a wooden deck with a Campari spritz and a bowl of fat green olives. Beneath me, the canal twinkles — but this isn’t Venice. I’m in Hackney, at trattoria Ombra, and the ripples under my feet belong to the Regent’s Canal, the nearly nine-mile stretch of water that winds its way from Paddington to Limehouse.

‘We really can’t complain,’ laughs head chef and restaurateur in demand, Mitshel Ibrahim, as he looks out over the water. ‘This place is a suntrap and it’s wonderful to be so close to nature. We’re very lucky.’ During his time at Ombra he has become quite the canal expert: as well as working beside it for the past four years he’s lived on it, aboard a narrowboat that he moves to a new mooring every fortnight. The water never stands still, but recently, he says, the pace of change has been noticeably quicker. ‘It’s become so much busier than it used to be.’

From cult brunch favourite the Towpath café to the East London Liquor Company’s distillery bar in Bow Wharf and Openaire near Little Venice, London’s first ‘float-in’ cinema (like a drive-in, but with boats), so many of the best spots for seeing out this surreal summer seem to be on or in the canal.

And that’s before you get to Cafe Cecilia, the eagerly awaited new opening from Max Rocha of St John and The River Café, French bakery The Floating Boulangerie (it’s so popular that you have to order your croissants days in advance) and The Cheese Barge, a 96ft vessel by Paddington station, where as the name suggests, the menu focuses on cheese. After spending decades in the shadow of the Thames, the Regent’s Canal is indisputably a main attraction again.

As a Rosie and Jim-obsessed child, the whole set-up struck me as hugely romantic, picturesque and full of possibility: canals were clearly places where anything could happen. My first job in the city was in Camden, overlooking the lock; I was mesmerised and paid far more attention to the water traffic and the human life along the banks than the tasks I’d been hired to perform (I lasted six months).

Eight years later I started making the notes for what would become my first novel, No Such Thing As Perfect, in my lunch hours on a bench by St Pancras Lock. Of course my love interest would live in a handsome houseboat moored by the railway bridge. Forget the sex scenes: for me the most thrilling bit of the whole process was writing a paragraph about how locks work.

When it was dreamt up 200 years ago by architect John Nash (the man behind Buckingham Palace), the Regent’s Canal was designed to be at the centre of Londoners’ lives. The grain that would become their breakfast toast arrived in the city by canal boat, as did the beer over which they wound down the working day. Then came the perishingly cold winter of 1962. For weeks the water was frozen solid and all the deliveries moved to the roads — they never came back and the canal fell into what looked like terminal disrepair.

Then came Coal Drops Yard, which (re)opened in 2019 in the once-derelict basins around St Pancras. Although it was preceded by nearby Granary Square, the Heatherwick Studio development was the first project to really pay attention to the canal. Landscaping and wildflower planting has turned the area into an urban nature reserve, and the brick walls along the towpath are now covered in climbing plants. It’s even made long-term residents look at the water with fresh eyes.

‘I’ve only really discovered the canal in the past few years,’ admits hospitality headhunter Richie Foster Thorn. The director of Fervent bought a flat in King’s Cross eight years ago, when Coal Drops Yard was just a twinkle in Thomas Heatherwick’s eye. ‘The towpath was a bit grotty back then — you’d wander through the graffiti and dog shit and eventually

find your way to Camden. It was all a building site for years and it’s been incredible to watch the transformation. Plus, when you’re in my line of work, there’s nowhere better to be in London.’

Now more than ever, hospitality and the canal feel a match made in heaven. Waterside venues nail the Covid-safe outdoors-but-indoors vibe better than anywhere else and come with a feeling of real freedom: think of the sky-terrace at bar and grill Parrillan in Coal Drops Yard, which seems to merge into Camley Street Natural Park on the opposite bank, or the corner of Hackney Wick that’s home to Crate Brewery and airy, zero-waste restaurant Silo. Londoners may turn their noses up at the touristy South Bank, but there’s no denying that being by the water feels like a holiday, even if you’re only a Tube stop from home.