How Little Venice gained its name

In Victorian Britain, people were obsessed with Venice. It all started in 1851 when the critic John Ruskin published The Stones of Venice. This monumental account of the city’s architecture inspired warehouses, ports and public buildings, all designed in the Venetian Gothic style.

For many, the parallels between the British and Venetian empires were striking. After all, Venice had been a trading nation with a dominant navy, a wealthy aristocracy and strong liberal values. But there was another point of similarity: canals.

Britain was the first country to develop a nationwide network of canals: 4,000 miles at its peak. The majority of this network was built between the 1770s and the 1830s, creating vital infrastructure for the Industrial Revolution.

One of the most important was the Regent’s Canal, which was constructed in the late Georgian Era. It linked the Grand Union Canal (the main connection between London and Birmingham) with the River Thames at Limehouse, linking the London docks with the industrial might of the Midlands.

The building of this canal was overseen by the architect and city planner John Nash, who was also responsible for Regent’s Street and Buckingham Palace. Nash developed several neighbourhoods near the canals, especially the streets surrounding Paddington Basin. Before the 1800s, Paddington had been a quiet village outside London, but now it was filled with stucco terraces in the Regency style, as well as detached villas and mansion blocks.

According to one account, from a boatman traversing the canal in 1855, this new neighbourhood was a ‘region of high walls and stuccoed gentility’, before the ‘world of warehouses, of saw-mills, and of foundries surrounding Camden’.

But it was Lord Byron who first compared this neighbourhood to Venice. According to the historian Lord Kinross, the poet wrote that ‘there would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington were it not for its artificial adjuncts.’

Despite this, the link between Venice and Maida Vale is often associated with another poet, Robert Browning. The celebrated Victorian writer lived at 19 Warwick Crescent between 1861–68, as well as spending several years in Italy and even dying in Venice. Which explains why the triangular basin where the Regent’s Canal, the Grand Union Canal and the Paddington branch meet is now known as Browning’s Pool, in tribute to his memory.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Britain’s canals were replaced by railways. Train tracks were much easier to lay, and steam engines were much quicker for transporting goods. Come the twentieth century, the road network was more popular for haulage, and as a result, the canals fell into disrepair. In 1948, the whole network had to be nationalised.

By the 1950s, this corner of Maida Vale had changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, the neighbourhood attracted thinkers and writers like the psychologist Sigmund Freud, who briefly lived in the Colonnade Hotel. The mathematician Alan Turing was born there too, while author Katherine Mansfield stayed at nearby Beauchamp Lodge.

In the decade after the Second World War, when much of London had been damaged during the Blitz, newspapers commented on how well-preserved the area north of Paddington. Some critics were reminded of a continental city like Bruges; others recalled Byron’s association with Venice. Soon, the nickname of Little Venice had stuck.

Sadly, the beautiful houses of Warwick Crescent have now been demolished. So too the local artists’ studios, replaced with a park called Rembrandt Gardens. That park was planted with tulips in 1970s, recalling the 700th anniversary of Amsterdam’s founding – the other great city of canals. And the Regent’s canal has since been cleaned and restored, with developments at Paddington and King’s Cross turning the towpath into one of the most popular public spaces in the city.

Today, there is nothing more pleasant on a spring afternoon than walking the towpath between Regent’s Park and Rembrandt Gardens. From the water’s edge, it’s still possible to glimpse some of the beautiful Regency houses and Victorian villas erected beside the water. Surrounded by barges, narrowboats, and the lapping waters of the canal, it feels like leaving London behind, or even visiting Venice for a few hours.