Things to Do in Little Venice on Foot

Things to do in Little Venice, roughly in the order we send people: get on a boat to Camden, walk the towpath, sit in Rembrandt Gardens, and look at the narrowboats moored along Blomfield Road. It is a small place. You can cover all of it in an afternoon and see the best of it in an hour. What follows is the walking version from our end of Harrow Road, including the stretch of towpath that stops dead and catches people out.

Where Little Venice starts and stops

Little Venice is the triangle of water where the Grand Union Canal's Paddington Arm meets the Regent's Canal. The wide part in the middle is Browning's Pool, named after the poet Robert Browning, who lived in Warwick Crescent in the 1860s. Before that it was the Broadwater, a holding area for barges queuing to get down to Paddington. It is working infrastructure that happens to be beautiful, which is not the same thing as a park.

The area people mean when they say Little Venice is smaller than the name suggests. Blomfield Road along one bank, Maida Avenue along the other, the Pool at the eastern end, Rembrandt Gardens on the point between the two canals. Ten minutes of walking gets you round the lot.

From us at 354 Harrow Road it is about a quarter of an hour on foot. Warwick Avenue station is twelve minutes from our door and the water sits a few minutes past it, so if you know that walk you already know most of this one. We have written up both routes from Warwick Avenue with the distances measured rather than guessed.

The towpath does not go where you think

This is the thing worth knowing before you set off. Walk east from Browning's Pool along the Regent's Canal and the towpath runs out at the Maida Hill Tunnel, 272 yards of brick with no path through it. The boats go under. You do not.

You come up to street level, cross Edgware Road, and pick the water back up on the far side at Aberdeen Place, which sits directly on top of the tunnel. It is signposted, though not well, and every few weeks somebody in the chair tells us they turned round there and went home assuming the walk was over. It is not. Camden is about an hour on from the tunnel mouth if you keep going.

Head the other way, west towards us, and the water tracks Harrow Road for a long stretch without ever quite touching it. That is the route we describe for anyone walking up from Paddington, and it is flat the whole way.

Things to do in Little Venice that are worth the walk

The boat to Camden. The best thing in Little Venice is leaving it by water. Jason's Trip, the London Waterbus Company and Jenny Wren all run narrowboats from the Pool down to Camden Lock in about forty-five minutes, through Regent's Park and past the zoo. Three quarters of an hour sitting down beats the same trip on your feet, and you see the backs of houses that no road takes you past.

Rembrandt Gardens. The small garden on the point, looking straight down the Pool. It was Warwick Avenue Gardens until 2 May 1975, when Westminster renamed it for Amsterdam's 700th anniversary and Amsterdam sent five thousand tulips and five hundred hyacinths. Best bench in W9 for eating lunch off your knees.

The Puppet Theatre Barge. A marionette theatre built into a converted barge, moored on Blomfield Road opposite number 35. Check the dates before you walk down for it, because it is not there all year. It spends the late summer at Richmond and returns to Little Venice in October, so at the start of September you would find an empty mooring and a wasted trip.

The Waterside Café. A floating café on a barge by the Pool, open since 1995, selling second hand books alongside the coffee. It is a boat, so it is small, and on a warm Saturday you queue.

Canal Café Theatre. Sixty seats upstairs at the Bridge House, on the corner of Westbourne Terrace Road and Delamere Terrace. Comedy for the most part, and you can eat in the pub underneath first.

Clifton Nurseries. Two minutes off the water on Clifton Villas. There has been a nursery on that plot since 1851, which makes it one of the oldest in London, and there is a tea room in among the plants. Worth going even if you have nowhere to put a plant.

The weekend it turns into something else

Over the first May bank holiday the Inland Waterways Association runs Canalway Cavalcade in the Pool. Around 130 boats moor up and dress themselves, and the rest is a real ale bar, Morris dancing, stalls and a lit boat pageant on the Sunday evening. It is free, and it is the busiest the water gets all year. If you had a quiet walk in mind that weekend, go west instead. If you want the canal at full volume, that is your date.

Doing it around a haircut

A fair few men book with us and make an afternoon of it, which is the honest reason this post exists. The order that works is us first, then the water, because nobody wants to sit still for forty minutes at the end of a long walk.

We are open 9am to 7:30pm Monday to Saturday and 10am to 6:30pm on Sunday, so a Sunday morning cut with a walk after it is an easy plan to make. There are six of us cutting at any one time, so a booked slot means the time it says on it. If you would rather not plan that tightly, we take walk-ins every day and the wait is usually short outside Saturday afternoon. A crew cut is £10 and takes twenty minutes, a haircut £15 in thirty, both of which are shorter than the boat to Camden. The rest of the price list is on the site.

Take the towpath over the road if the weather lets you. And when you are doing the tunnel detour at Edgware Road, look up at Crocker's Folly on Aberdeen Place while you are stood at the lights.