Just what is it about this North London canal in fiction?
How did the area by the Regent’s canal in Maida Vale come to be known as Little Venice?
A London guidebook I had suggested that the term had first been used by estate agents in the 1950s. I was therefore surprised to find that the name is used in Margery Allingham’s 1934 art-fraud detective story Death of a Ghost.
In the novel, it is not the area but a house that is called “Little Venice”. An artistic clan left over from the Victorian age inhabits the stucco house by the canal basin. So it appears that an estate agent had read Allingham and borrowed the name.
There is a little bit more to it than that, though. This was where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived, sometimes rowing out to the island in the basin. Allingham mentions “the Crescent”, presumably Warwick Crescent to the south of the canal basin, and Browning’s house was here. Allingham is linking her fictional Victorian painter, John Lafcadio, with Browning, who was rumoured to have commented on the resemblance of this area of London to Venice. There has even been a suggestion that the name was coined by Byron.
Personally, I think it’s all down to Allingham and the rest is an attempt to pull in the tourists. For example, the island is now known as “Browning’s Island”.
I could write a lot more about Allingham and London. I write as one who once spent an afternoon in Bloomsbury, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the square with the little church that features so memorably in The Tiger in the Smoke.
Maida Vale makes its next significant appearance in fiction in Books do Furnish a Room, the tenth volume of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence, published in 1971, but set in 1946/47, finishing in the freezing winter of that year. This novel introduces a new character, the writer Trapnel, based on Julian Maclaren-Ross. When Pamela Widmerpool embarks on her extra-marital affair with Trapnel, she lives with him in a seedy flat in this area, a bit north of the canal itself.
Jenkins, the narrator, makes an excursion into this netherworld to deliver a book for Trapnel to review. He notes that the area by the canal had not at that time become what he calls a “quartier chic”, as it did later: “The neighbourhood looked anything but flourishing.” There are gaps along the canal where houses have been reduced to rubble by the recent bombing. This now run-down zone is Trapnel’s stamping ground, a suitable locale for a bohemian writer.
The canal proves fatal to Trapnel when Pam throws the manuscript of his novel into it, destroying both the physical pages and Trapnel’s resolve and determination as a writer. It is followed by Trapnel’s death’s head swordstick, which he throws in a despairing gesture. The oily canal, with floating litter of all kinds, might as well be the Styx.
We are in the late 1940s literary scene here, the world of little magazines such as Horizon. Widmermool, MP, businessman and all-round establishment figure, is the proprietor of the magazine Trapnel writes for. There’s a sharp contrast between his West End Parliamentary world and altogether shabbier milieu that Pam has moved into with Trapnel.
Trapnel is supposed to live in a succession of flats in the Paddington area borrowed from acquaintances at his favourite Fitzrovia pub, The Hero of Acre. Powell enthusiasts have identified this as being probably based on The Wheatsheaf. We tend to think of Fitzrovia as a time and place of the1940s, but it appears in the Allingham novel too, which is set in 1930. Campion goes to The Robespierre in Charlotte Street, “that most odd of all London pubs”.
A few years later a location further along the canal appears in John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The address of the safe house where the mole meets his Russian contact is 5 Lock Gardens, Camden Town, in reality St Mark’s Crescent. It is one of those houses with a walled garden backing on to the canal. Peter Guillam waits on the other side of the canal for the signal that the traitor has arrived. The towpath is closed to the public after dark, leaving it to lovers and down-and-outs, a smell rises from the water and the trains that pass are empty.
John le Carré has always been quite precise about the social status of particular London districts. “The neighbourhood possessed no social identity” is his verdict here. This is a long way from the Pall Mall clubland world of the senior spies. It’s somehow suggested that this is a marginal zone, a very suitable place for undercover activity.
If Powell, looking back from 1971 was able to suggest that the gentrification of Little Venice had already taken place, no such improvement is evident here. In 1974, Camden market has not yet brought the area back to prominence in the minds of a younger generation.
I’m sure there are many other examples of the strange appeal of the canal being used in fiction. After all, Ruth Rendell was a resident of Little Venice. I believe her last novel was set close to home, but I have not read it. So, I would encourage you to explore this fascinating area of London both in reality and on the page.
The Good Reader 