London Canal Museum

We're at the Brentford Canal Festival today, and there's no better place to think about just how much this stretch of water once mattered.

When the Grand Junction Canal reached Brentford in 1805, it cut around 60 miles off the journey between Birmingham and London, bypassing the unreliable upper reaches of the Thames entirely. Brentford became the point where everything changed hands. Large Thames lighters couldn't navigate the narrower inland canals, so cargoes were unloaded and reloaded onto narrowboats at the wharf: timber, coal, grain, steel, and stranger things besides.

One of our favourites: barrels of lime juice imported from the West Indies were warehoused here before travelling up the canal to Rose's factory in Hertfordshire. That trade ran until 1981.

The town also had a Boatmen's Institute, built in 1904–05 by the City Mission, with a school for canal children temporarily ashore and a maternity unit for boatwomen on the upper floor.

Our volunteers are here today. Come and find our stall for a chat about London's waterways, and find out more about the London Canal Museum in King's Cross.

It's time for another .

In June 1811, the most talked-about party in London drew 2,000 guests to a house on Pall Mall. Supper was served at 3am. The host sat at the head of a table stretching 200 feet through a Gothic conservatory lit by candelabras twelve feet above the ground.

Running down the centre of that table was a miniature canal.

La Belle Assemblée reported it had water flowing from a silver fountain, with moss and aquatic flowers along its banks, and gold and silver mechanical fish swimming through the current.

The host was a figure with a connection to the Regent's Canal - can you work out who it was and their connection? Leave your answer below 🔍

It's the end of Volunteers' Week, and we want to say thank you.

The London Canal Museum is run by a small team, and it's our 60+ volunteers who make it work day to day. They greet visitors, guide passengers on boat trips through the Islington Tunnel, run the shop and bookshop, support Family Fun Days, maintain our collection and help share the history of London's waterways with thousands of visitors a year.

Without them, there's no museum.

We're incredibly grateful for every shift, every guided commentary, and every visitor who left knowing a little more about the Regent's Canal than when they arrived.

Thank you ❤️

Looking for your next summer read? June's book recommendation is from Alette - Britain’s Canals: Exploring Their Architectural and Engineering Wonders by Anthony Burton and Derek Pratt

"This book is about the architecture and engineering of British canals, with beautiful illustrations.

Read about the challenges canal builders faced and how they met them through design innovations.

The book covers locks and staircase locks, lock cottages, basins, yards and warehouses, pumping stations, bridges, junctions, aqueducts and tollhouses.

And of course, tunnels, including the Regent’s Canal Islington tunnel through which our seasonal tunnel trips run. A fascinating book."

📖 Pick up your copy of Britain’s Canals next time you visit our museum bookshop!

We are so happy to be included in this map ❤️

There is plenty for children and families to see and do at the London Canal Museum. Our visitors tell us that they love how many of our exhibits can be touched, explored, and played with and how our small, family-friendly size makes for a relaxing, stress-free visit.

So, plan your trip with us to:
- take a trip back through time by dressing up in traditional canal children's clothes,
- explore our narrow boat Coronis and see how a family would have lived, and use our play food to lay out a delicious meal for your family,
- jump aboard our blue tractor and see what they were used for on the canals,
- peer down our ice well, and see if you can guess how deep it is,
- spend some time with Henrietta the horse and look at the sort of goods that were transported by the canals,
- play in our ice cream parlour and serve up some pompom ice creams after taking your family’s order and
- explore our shop, which has a gorgeous range of affordable, child-friendly products to take home as a reminder of your visit.

https://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/

To celebrate Local & Community History Month, we're drawing attention to local museums on our London Children’s Map!
Today, the spotlight’s on the London Canal Museum, where you can peer into a Victorian ice well that once stored ice imported from Norway!

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Did you live on Battlebridge Basin — or do you still? If so, we'd love to hear from you.

Later this year, the London Canal Museum is planning a temporary exhibition tracing the history of the basin and its transition from industrial use to where people live and work. If you have lived here at any point from the 1970s onwards, your memories are part of that record.

We are looking for people willing to share anecdotes, sit for a recorded interview, or let us digitise photographs or personal ephemera from their time on the water. Families who raised children here, long-term residents who've watched the basin change, people who moved on years ago — all welcome.

If this is you, or you know someone who fits, please get in touch with Jane at [email protected].

It's International Museum Day! 🏛️

We are usually closed on a Monday, but you can still look beneath the surface. Most museums were built to be galleries - ours was built to be a giant Victorian 'refrigerator'.

Beneath our ground floor lie two massive ice wells that once held tonnes of ice shipped from Norway. While physical access to the wells is reserved for our special 'Ice Weekend', you can still explore their history digitally today.

Use our digital guide to learn the story of the ice trade, then follow the link to our website to access our live, controllable 'well-cam'. Peer into the darkness of the ice wells and discover the engineering that kept London cool in the 1800s.

🔗 https://f.mtr.cool/pxwwfcpskg

It's 🎭

Carlo Gatti helped bring affordable ice cream to Victorian London — but ice cream and the ice trade were only half the story.

When his Hungerford Market café was demolished in 1862 to make way for Charing Cross Station, Gatti received £7,750 in compensation. He and his family put it back into London's entertainment scene, opening Gatti's Palace of Varieties — also known as 'Gatti's over the Water' — and 'Gatti's in the Arches' under the railway in the vaults of Villiers Street.

The Gatti venues offered something relatively new for working and lower-middle-class Londoners: a respectable, family-friendly night out. George Leybourne — the original 'Champagne Charlie' — was among the celebrated performers who appeared on his stages.

Each year, we honour this legacy with our own Music Hall performance at the museum, featuring the New Players' Theatre Company. Tickets for Gatti's Music Hall on 21st November 2026 are available now: canalmuseum.org.uk/whatson/music-hall.htm

Half-term is two weeks away. If you're planning an activity for the Tuesday, here's one worth booking early.

On 26th May, the London Canal Museum is running a Family Fun Day themed around Nature Crowns. It starts on the water, families board Long Tom, our canal boat, for a trip along Regent's Canal to St Pancras Lock and back. The Regent's Canal is a designated Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation, so there's plenty to spot along the banks: coots, moorhens, and the occasional kingfisher.

Your ticket includes:
• A trip on Long Tom to St Pancras Lock
• A craft workshop to build your own Nature Crown, inspired by what you spot on the water 👑
• Access to our interactive Family Fun Trail
• Dressing up and play opportunities, including in our ice cream parlour

Our school holiday boat trips are very popular, and spaces are strictly limited.
Children £5.50 · Adults (16+) £10.50
🎟️ All the details and booking: canalmuseum.org.uk/whatson/family-fun-days.htm

Today is the feast day of St Pancras — the second of three Catholic saints known collectively as the 'Ice Saints', whose mid-May dates were traditionally associated with one last cold snap before summer arrives.

It's an oddly fitting day for a museum originally built for the storage of ice.

Carlo Gatti came to London in 1847, built a trade importing natural ice from Norway, and stored it in the wells beneath what is now our museum's building on Battlebridge Basin, King's Cross. That ice supplied fishmongers, hospitals, and a city only just beginning to understand refrigeration.

Those wells are still standing. They're the only Victorian ice wells open to the public anywhere in the UK — and they open for guided tours just once a year, on Ice Sunday in July as part of our annual Ice Weekend.

Find details and tickets at canalmuseum.org.uk

Image of St Pancras © St Pancras Old Church