City streets,  London,  Monday walks,  Plants,  Street art,  Street photography

Along the Regents Canal

April 7, 2026 / 45 Comments

Days well spent are those with friends

Albert Schweitzer

What can be pleasanter on a spring day than a leisurely walk with a friend, bookended with coffee and lunch? A week or so I had exactly that pleasure, meeting up with blogging friend Margaret (of From Pyrenees to Pennines in Camden for a walk by the Regents Canal.

The Regents Canal links the Grand Union Canal in Paddington with the Thames in east London, via the Limehouse Basin. It is 8.6 miles (13.8 kilometres) long and like most canals has a towpath. These towpaths were originally used by horses to pull barges but today are popular places for walking, jogging and cycling (where wide enough).

We started our walk in Camden Town where many of the shops have colourful frontages.

The Regents Canal

We had a coffee by the canal, relishing the fact that it was warm enough to sit outside. Then we started to follow the canal in an easterly direction. On the way we passed lots of street art (or should that be canal art?), interesting buildings and some narrowboats. The latter are mostly permanently moored here, providing more affordable accommodation (I won’t say cheap) in this pricey part of town.

‘Canal’ art

Towpath walkers, narrowboat and rope

St Pancras Gardens

We left the towpath at Camley Street to visit two favourite spots of mine. The first, St Pancras Gardens, is the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church and is a peaceful spot despite lying right next to the mainline train route into St Pancras Station. The church itself is Victorian, but thought by some to stand on a site founded in 314 AD by Romans camped nearby. We popped our heads into the church but a rather large walking tour group had arrived just before us and were seated listening to their guide, so we didn’t linger.

The Hardy Tree

Instead we had a mooch around the gardens. I wanted to show Margaret two sights in particular, although one is rather a non-sight these days. Until a couple of years ago the churchyard was home to an ash tree known as the Hardy Tree.

The story goes that when the Midland Railway Company began building its new station (St Pancras) during the 1860s, the line ran through this churchyard. Numerous graves had to be dug up and moved. The job of clearing the churchyard fell to architect Arthur Blomfield who assigned the job to his assistant, a young Thomas Hardy. Yes, the same one who went on to write Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and other classics. Hardy stacked rows of the headstones around the trunk of an ash tree. Or, in other versions of the story, he stacked them, then planted a tree in the centre.

There are two problems with this tale, much as I would love to believe it. Firstly, the tree probably arrived several decades after the work undertaken by Arthur Blomfield and his young assistant. Photos of St Pancras churchyard from 1926 show the piled gravestones without the tree. And secondly, the tree fell during a storm in December 2022.

Actually, I have a third problem in recounting this tale. I took no photos while there with Margaret as I knew I had several from a previous visit when the tree was still there. But can I find those photos? No, I can’t! So here’s a link to an article about the tree’s demise in my favourite online publication about all things London, the Londonist, with a photo of the gravestones taken when the tree still stood in their midst: https://londonist.com/london/latest-news/the-hardy-tree-of-st-pancras-has-fallen.

Famous graves

Several famous people are buried in the churchyard. They include Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist, advocate for women’s rights and the mother of author Mary Shelley. Admirers of her work often leave little tributes here; not the conventional flowers but small pebbles, shells, acorns and more.

Grave of Mary Wollstonecraft

Another interesting tomb is that of the architect Sir John Soane. He designed it himself for his wife Eliza and was later buried here alongside her. I don’t have a photo of the entire tomb (I have a bad habit of only photographing details rather than capturing the full picture!) But if you have a look at the photo here you can see why it is said to have inspired the design of the traditional red telephone boxes in the UK.

Grave of Sir John Soane and his wife Eliza

Camley Street Nature Park

On the other side of Camley Street, and the other side of the tracks, is Camley Street Nature Park. This small nature reserve is a true haven, squeezed between the canal the railway tracks. The site was once a coal drop for the railways into nearby King’s Cross Railway Station. After demolition in the 1960s it was colonised by nature. The London Wildlife Trust ran a campaign to save the site from development and created the reserve with donations and lottery funding. Today there is a remarkable variety of habitats squeezed into this small space, including woodland, grassland and wetland (with ponds, reedbed and marshy areas).

We had a stroll around but, on this occasion, didn’t spot a lot of wildlife apart from a couple of coots. However on other visits I’ve seen plenty of butterflies, bees and even frogs!

Granary Square

We crossed the canal by the footbridge next to the nature park which brought us to Coal Drop Yards, another development on a former coal yard site, but very different; this one is devoted to the much more usual urban pastime of shopping. We skipped that and passed through to Granary Square. This large open space is yet another modern transformation of a previously industrial canal-side site. Along its northern edge are several restaurants housed in the former warehouse, the Granary Building. In the centre are seating areas, over 1,000 choreographed fountains and art displays. And on the southern edge is a terrace sloping down to the canal where you can sit and enjoy the view over a take-away coffee or ice cream from nearby outlets.

In Granary Square

This is one of my favourite areas for eating out in London, so I was pleased to be able to introduce Margaret to a restaurant I’ve enjoyed in the past, Caravan. We sat over a selection of tapas for some time, chatting so much that I forgot to take any photos of the food or restaurant. It was a great reminder that while it is lovely to make so many friends around the world through blogging, nothing quite beats a face-to-face meeting!

You’ll have seen some of these photos already in my March round-up, but the story of this Monday Walk would be incomplete without them. All were taken in March 2026.

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