The London Canal Museum

If you're planning a visit to London in the Spring, and are looking for somewhere to get out of the rain, take the tube to Kings Cross, and find your way to New Wharf Road, about five minutes' walk away. Here you'll find the London Canal Museum, beside Battlebridge Basin, on the Regent's Canal.

The Museum has been open for over ten years, and is constantly being improved, having access for people in wheelchairs and a children's play area. It costs £3 to enter through the shop and Visitors' Reception area.

The building is on the site of a warehouse built by Carlo Gatti, a nineteenth century ice merchant and ice-cream maker, and the history of his trade is shown here too.

Prominent among the canal-related items is the narrow boat butty CORONIS. You can go into the boat and get an idea of how the boaters' families lived in the cramped conditions. An audio narrative helps set the scene.

Around the Museum are dotted various items of canal ware, which the curators have gone to some trouble to place in its context as far as possible, so that visitors can appreciate where and how objects were used by the crews and their families. Models wearing the type of clothes worn by the working boaters move among the visitors. Their clothes are cared for by expert craftspeople.

Outside on the higher level you are in Battlebridge Basin, full of moored boats, including the Museum's Bantam Tug, recently restored at a cost of £4,000, and still used, especially at the annual Canal Cavalcade at nearby Little Venice.

Here an interpretation board illustrates the area when it was fully devoted to industry and commerce, and there are also outside exhibits of cargo handling gear. On this level, too, are the remains of the wells Gatti dug to store the Norwegian ice which was brought in barges along the Regent's Canal from the Thames to his warehouse.

The history of the Regent's Canal is told alongside display cases holding models of various kinds of canal craft, including the steel narrow boats built for the famous GUCCCo - the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company.

Horses and their equipment, including a model horse, are also prominent. Not only did Gatti rely on horses to cart ice around to private customers, and to sell his ice cream in the city, but the canals, of course, also used horses to haul the boats before engines displaced them.

On the same floor as the stables, which Gatti's horses were brought up to by lift, are viewing areas for two Video displays relating to the history of the Regent's Canal and the Museum.

Opening hours are from Tuesday to Sunday (plus Bank Holiday Mondays, but not Christmas and New Year's Day), from 10 am to 4.30pm. The staff are all volunteers.

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