Regent’s Canal City Road Basin – Islington Boat Club (1974).
LAST month saw the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Regent’s Canal. The planned festival, which included a brass band playing along the water, was postponed, but Islington Museum’s exhibition, Barging Down the River, is now available online.
Looking at the canal’s original role as an essential transport route into the city, and its transformation in the last 50 years, it includes an absolute delight: the fascinating and elegiac juxtaposition of Harry Parkinson’s film of his journey by working barge from Limehouse to Paddington in 1924 with Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie’s 2011 shot-for-shot remake (friendsofim.com/ barging-through-islington).
It took a major rethink to get the exhibition up and running in a completely different format from the original intended. “We had to make a radical change,” says Mark Aston, local history manager. “We were partnered with Regent’s Park Heritage – they had panels to go up – and we rewrote the whole thing. But we couldn’t let the 200th anniversary go past. The canal is an important part of our lives in Islington and there’s more and more people using it.”
Of course, many more events were planned for the bicentenary and Mark is fairly confident that they’ll take place next year. “It would be a shame not to go ahead with it. Everything’s ready to go.”
However, in the meantime, why not put together your own celebration of the 200th anniversary? Also in the exhibition are photographs comparing the past with now, and plenty of information on the canal’s building and development. An interesting section gives the history of the Islington and Gainsborough Studios on the south side of the canal, where Alfred Hitchcock cut his teeth, and which used the canal in some of the films produced.
Regent’s Canal Heritage collects oral histories, photos, ephemera and historic accounts, and runs exhibitions and events. An online Canal Heritage Audio Walk is packed with the voices of locals remembering life along the Regent from Islington to Limehouse (www. regentscanalheritage.org.uk/ pod-casts), while a selection of films from 1926 through to 2014 show the changing life of the canal through the last 100 years.
The Canal Tales (2020) is a 25-minute adaptation, made during lockdown, of a play written by Linda Wilkinson in 2018, in which members of the Young Actors Theatre, Islington, bring to life the history of the
Regent, using voice-overs, news presentations and original audio (youtu.be/pSCB2tJ_eos).
Carolyn Clark, community historian and member of Regent’s Canal Heritage, has written The East End Canal Tales, published earlier this year. It weaves the memories of local residents with historical accounts ranging over the two centuries and is available from The Shoreditch Tales website (www. shoreditchtales.com/shop). For a flavour of the book, read Along the Towpath: 200 years of life on the Regent’s Canal, for which she contributed information and photos (romanroadlondon.com/ history-regents-canal-200year-anniversary).
A half-hour interview with her in May shines a light on how she came to write it (youtu.be/7Bu4HHXa1Ok).
Finally, buried in the depths of its website, is the London Canal Museum’s Industrial Islington exhibition (www. canalmuseum.org.uk/ indislington/islington1.htm). The museum is currently open Friday to Sunday, so you could also pop along and see the exhibition in situ.
Indeed, with the next 200 years in mind, the museum aims to build an archive of photographs of the Regent Canal in 2020 and with that aim is running its Regent’s 200 Photographic Competition.
Free to enter, it has a first prize of £300 and closes on October 31.
Go to www.canalmuseum.org. uk/whatson/rc200photo.htm for more information.