Regent's Canal was cut through farmland in 1820 to link the Grand Junction Canal at Paddington with the Thames at Limehouse, carrying coal, timber, and construction materials into the heart of the city. The stretch that curves past Camden Lock was industrial territory for a century and a half—wharves, stables, and warehouses lined the towpath, and horse-drawn narrowboats queued at the three-chamber lock system that lifts the waterway twelve feet in under two hundred yards. By the 1960s commercial traffic had ceased, the basins silted over, and demolition plans circulated. The market that now fills the old Pickfords stables and T. E. Dingwall's timber yard began as a weekend craft fair in 1974, and the canal survived as an amenity rather than a freight route. Today the waterway threading through Camden Lock remains one of London's few working canals where narrowboats still navigate manually operated locks, and the Camden Market boat ride offers a rare vantage on this hidden infrastructure. Regent's Canal threads eight and a half miles across north London, passing through two tunnels, twelve locks, and a landscape that shifts from postindustrial basins to Regency stucco within half a mile. The route westward toward Regent's Park and Little Venice traces John Nash's original vision of a grand water approach to his planned royal park, while the eastern arm descends through Islington's deep brick cuttings toward King's Cross and the redeveloped Granary Square. The canal's engineering—lock chambers faced in Staffordshire blue brick, cast-iron balance beams, paddle gear unchanged since 1820—remains visible and functional. The Camden Lock section is the busiest stretch of inland waterway in Britain, with narrowboats, kayaks, and tour vessels sharing a channel nine feet deep and fourteen feet wide. The working lock demonstration at Camden Lock itself is one of the few places in London where visitors can watch—and sometimes assist—a manual lock operation, gates swinging open on hundred-year-old ironwork, water spilling through sluices as the boat rises or falls. The canal's towpath, once trodden by horses hauling seventy-ton barges, now carries two million walkers and cyclists a year, but the view from the water remains distinct—brick vaults, iron mooring rings, and the underside of Victorian bridges that road traffic never sees. Camden Market boat ride tours depart from West Yard, where the waterbus basin opens directly onto the market's cobbled courtyards, and follow the canal in both directions depending on the route and tide of foot traffic above.