Wenlock Basin


The Wenlock Basin, is a 320 metre long canal basin on the Regent's Canal, in the Hoxton area of the London Borough of Hackney. The City Road Basin lies just to the west of Wharf Road and is in the neighbouring London Borough of Islington.
There are private residential moorings at the North end, with their own entrance gate and entryphone on Wharf Road. The basin itself narrows considerably towards the South - and is not deep enough to be navigable by anything other than canoe.
Unlike the Regent's Canal and City Road Basin, Wenlock Basin is not owned or managed by the Canal & River Trust.

History

The basin was constructed in 1826 and is close to the entrance of the Islington Tunnel, where a tug service operated until the 1930s. The opening of the basin went badly wrong, with the cofferdam separating it from the Canal collapsing, prematurely filling the basin and leading to the water level of the canal falling by 13 inches. Traffic on the canal was halted until rainfall could restore the water levels.
The basin took the name of Wenlock Barns, a local farm. The name Wenlock was used by an electoral ward of the former Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, it was also, for a time, the name of a ward in the London Borough of Hackney.

Residential developments

Wenlock Basin is accessible only to residents. The development consists of the following buildings:
While no longer serving the original cargo handling and warehousing business, a number of modern businesses have office space on Wenlock Basin, either in the ground floor business units of the larger residential developments - or in their own property directly backing on to the basin. They include the Victoria Miro Gallery, a leading British contemporary art gallery in London run by Victoria Miro, and the British Ecological Society, a learned society in the field of Ecology.

Gallery