The Regent's Canal waterbus route between Camden Lock and Little Venice covers 2.5 miles of working canal, passing through three locks and a 272-metre tunnel constructed in 1816. The waterway was cut to link the Grand Junction Canal at Paddington with the Limehouse Basin docks, shortening freight routes by seven miles and sparing horse-drawn barges the congestion of central London streets. By 1820 the canal carried two million tons of cargo annually—coal, timber, ice from Norway—but rail competition eroded the trade by the 1850s, and commercial traffic ceased in 1969. The London Waterbus Company launched scheduled passenger service in 1987, converting narrow-beam cargo boats into open-deck vessels that now carry 40,000 passengers each season. The camden lock boat to little venice journey departs from the West Yard moorings beneath the railway viaduct, where Hampstead Road Lock—the canal's third-deepest chamber at 2.7 metres—drops vessels to the Regent's Park level. The route threads between the neoclassical terraces of Park Village East and the northern perimeter of London Zoo, where wildfowl enclosures visible from the towpath were designed by Berthold Lubetkin in 1934. At Lisson Grove the canal enters Maida Hill Tunnel, bored through London clay without intermediate shafts; narrowboats navigate it in single file, their exhaust echoing off the brickwork. Emerging at the western portal, the waterway broadens into the triangular basin at Little Venice, where the Regent's and Grand Union canals converge beneath plane trees and Regency stucco facades. Camden Lock itself transformed from a maintenance yard and timber wharf into a weekend market in 1974, catalysing the district's shift from light industrial zone to retail and nightlife quarter. The West Yard lock gates, manufactured by Bradley & Craven in 1968 and still manually operated, regulate water flow from the summit pound at Islington. Waterbus tickets aboard the canal cruise allow visitors to trace the same hydraulic infrastructure that powered nineteenth-century London's expansion—three hand-cranked lock mechanisms, cast-iron bollards stamped with the Grand Junction Canal Company crest, and the mile-long straightaway past Regent's Park where towpath elms were felled in the 1970s Dutch elm disease epidemic and replanted with limes. The route remains the only scheduled waterbus link crossing Zone 1 without entering the Thames, preserving the quieter, lock-punctuated rhythm of England's canal age.