“After the Olympics, it looked like a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces, but 14 years on, it’s a destination,” says Mike Magan of the Lower Lea Valley, east London. Once a network of derelict industrial waterways and canalised channels, it has become the backbone of one of Europe’s largest regeneration projects. In the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, disused warehouses and rail yards were cleared to create the Olympic Park, and now the area is being reimagined as a waterside district with shops, offices, studios, cultural centres and 33,000 new homes. Magan is chief operating officer of Here East, the technology campus on the stretch of canal now known as London’s East Bank: it’s home to the recently opened V&A East, BBC Music Studios and UAL London College of Fashion. “The canals create so much atmosphere,” he says. “A disenfranchised part of the city has come to life.”
Britain’s 2,000-mile canal infrastructure underpinned the rise of industrial towns and cities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, linking ports and mines to factories and mills in city centres. They began to lose relevance in the 19th century, when businesses turned to road and rail, yet they can now help solve Britain’s housing crisis, according to Heather Clarke, strategy and impact director of the Canal & River Trust, the charity protecting the country’s waterways.
“Blue urbanism”, the development of brownfield sites around canals into residential neighbourhoods, is under way in cities including Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow — as well as London. The government has added an extra £6.5mn of funding to the £52.6mn it provides the Canal & River Trust each year to keep the waterways in order.
“Bristol’s growth was fuelled by trading ships being able to come in and out of its floating harbour and canals. Now these same waterways are fuelling growth again,” says Elise Baudon, of Prior + Partners, masterplanning consultant for Bristol Temple Quarter, a 130-hectare development of offices, shops and 10,000 new homes near the main railway station and city centre. “Our regeneration plans use these waterways as a structuring feature, with public realm, walking routes and bridges reconnecting the city centre with its historic waterside infrastructure.”
Buyers seem on board. A report by Savills, focusing on regeneration in Birmingham, suggests that properties within 100 metres of the waterway achieve a 10 per cent higher price on average than those 1km away. A separate study by the London School of Economics indicates that the proportion of properties that sell in new-build developments is 75 per cent higher within 100 metres of a canal.
But along some stretches of canal, the promise of a community idyll takes some vivid imagining. Crowded with industrial warehouses on one side and a road on the other, Bristol’s Feeder Canal, which runs through the Bristol Temple Quarter site, is currently a world away from being the focal point of a buzzing neighbourhood. There are also fears that enthusiasm for canal regeneration sites by local authorities over-prioritises residential density, eroding local history and character.
A canal alone does not create a vibrant area for a community, cautions Marcus Chaloner, head of placemaking and design at the Canal & River Trust; there are plenty of soulless and uninspiring canal-side districts. Canals’ superpower, he asserts, is that they are “places to get close to nature and heritage”. They have the potential to be both community hubs and “regeneration corridors” — bucolic walks for schoolchildren and commuters that can connect a new neighbourhood to other parts of the city. Regeneration must be careful, thoughtful and meaningful. “Slab-like anonymous waterfront development doesn’t do anything for anybody. It doesn’t bring joy.”
A study by the University of Exeter’s BlueHealth project, which analysed data from 19,000 people across 18 countries, found that living near “blue space” such as rivers, canals or the coast is linked to higher wellbeing and better mental health.
“Canals are breathing space in a city — an attractive place to walk, cycle and hang out,” says James Whittaker of Peel Waters, a subsidiary of the family-owned Peel Group, which was involved in the development of Salford Quays in Manchester and is now leading the Liverpool Waters transformation of part of the city’s historic northern docks, which will provide 7,200 homes as well as a 2.1-hectare park. “Scandinavian cities such as Copenhagen and Oslo have been focusing on canal regeneration for decades — now we’re catching up.”
The Dutch are the obvious pioneers of vibrant canal regeneration: in Amsterdam, projects such as Java Island, a former port transformed into a residential community, and IJburg, a neighbourhood on a canalised lake, show how — with the right mix of shops, restaurants and public realm — high-density canal-side neighbourhoods can feel eclectic rather than sterile, Chaloner continues.
At the centre of this is looking after, and connection to, the canal itself. At the £3bn King’s Cross regeneration project in London, a fund was set up in partnership with British Waterways London (now the Canal & River Trust) to care for and rejuvenate the 1.8km stretch of the canal passing through the development, which Chaloner believes contributed to its success. “The fund is a recognition of the value of the canal to the development,” he says. “In recent years in addition to maintenance, we have been able to use it to cover the cost of activities that enhance and enrich the area.” At Port Loop, in Birmingham, buildings are set back from the canal to create public space. “Developers have realised that Juliet balconies overlooking the canal don’t help people connect with the water — at Port Loop public spaces with amenities allow everyone in the community to enjoy it,” Chaloner says.
Other developments have embraced the linear park concept: the East Bank in east London has playgrounds, water features and interactive sculptures. Visitors can even take to the water on swan-shaped pedalos. At King’s Cross on a summer’s day, the steps connecting the towpath to tree-lined Bagley Walk are a popular place to chat, picnic and play.
Houseboats, floating cafés and paddle-board hire shops bring the waterways into community life, adds Whittaker, who has created a sauna pontoon with ice baths at Liverpool Waters; the UK’s first floating padel courts are set to open there later this year. “It’s always a chicken and egg situation, as shops and cafés want proven footfall,” Whittaker says. “But if you install aspirational facilities, they see that the community is going to work.”
“Anchor” institutions such as universities, galleries and flagship businesses lend gravitas and put an area on the city map, adds Magan. There are now several universities in and around what is now called Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, including Loughborough University London and UCL East. In Bristol, the University of Bristol’s new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus will bring thousands of students into the Temple Quarter development. “You have to cultivate a new community; bring in the artists, designers and young people and learn from them,” Magan says.
Rajeev Mutyalu, an interior designer and creative technologist, and his wife, Gireesha, say they spend more time outside and feel more part of the community since moving to Grand Union, a canal-side development in Wembley, in June 2025. Rajeev cycles to work along the towpath and they walk their dog, Donut, in the 14-acre gardens surrounding the development. “He loves walks along the canal,” Rajeev says. “We looked into a few different options across London, but when we saw the canal views from this apartment we knew we had found our home.” Although it’s a new development that has not yet fully sold, there’s a sense of community beside the water, Rajeev continues. “I’ve met people on my walks, there’s a crepes café on a narrow boat which we all enjoy, and sometimes there are stalls and events on the canal-side piazza.” A community app has a useful marketplace function, he says, and for families there is a soft play, a café and nursery.
The jury is out as to how faithful a canal-side district should be to its heritage. The Grand Union development is part of a new-build 22-acre canal-side neighbourhood on the site of the former Northfields Industrial Estate. There is no evidence to suggest that people value heritage buildings any more than contemporary developments around the canal, says Emily Williams of Savills Research. “The water is what makes the difference.” A 2017 study by the University of Warwick, quantifying the beauty of outdoor places, ranks canals as having as high a scenic rating as churches, castles and towers.
Yet where there are former industrial buildings, it makes sense to use them — the renovated coal yards and warehouses at King’s Cross in London, for example — as they scrub up well. Celebrating history can help with placemaking, she adds. More modern buildings can also be repurposed, she says: the former Olympic press office has been repurposed into The Trampery on the Gantry, colourful studios for creatives.
“These aren’t housing projects, they’re placemaking projects,” says Clem Teagle of Bristol Temple Quarter, where the Grade I-listed Temple Meads station forms part of the development, along with a Brunel Mile walking and cycling route to celebrate Bristol’s engineering history. “Making the most of the canal and heritage assets form a large part of that.” Similarly, at Liverpool Waters, the Hydraulic Tower is being restored to form the centrepiece of the new Everton FC stadium, and roads have been named after historic figures. “We’ve kept the cobbles and are making features of the old buildings, while complementing them with modern buildings and facilities,” Whittaker says.
Brownfield canal sites are more than able to support large-scale housing schemes, according to the Canal & River Trust’s Clarke, as “blue space allows for high densities without losing the sense of openness”.
There are also environmental advantages to building urban neighbourhoods close to canals; research by the University of Manchester shows that waterways create a “cool corridor” up to 100 metres wide, mitigating heat trapped by surrounding buildings and lowering local air temperatures by up to 1.6°C through evaporation and thermal absorption. Canals are also a potential renewable heat source: at Liverpool Waters, the new Mersey Heat Energy Centre harnesses heat from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and will eventually heat up to 17,000 homes via water-source heat pumps, saving roughly 4,200 tonnes of carbon annually.
Yet “brownfield waterfront land is not without its challenges”, Whittaker says. Canals are often bordered by marshland — Queen Elizabeth Park is on the fringes of Hackney Marshes, for example, while part of Bristol Temple Quarter is on St Philip’s Marsh. These areas can only be developed with flood defence strategies. St Philip’s Marsh will involve raised defences along the riverside and Feeder Canal frontage, Teagle explains, as well as new lock gates at the entrance to the canal; the total cost for flood defence in phase 1 of the project is around £255mn, mainly funded by central government Flood Defence Grant-in-Aid.
“On previous industrial, brownfield sites, there’s also a high likelihood of elements of contamination on site requiring a remediation strategy, which can be costly,” Whittaker adds. “But once you’ve solved them, the land can support sustainable, future-proofed housing.”
Chaloner adds that well-designed redevelopment schemes on brownfield land, while not directly improving water quality, present opportunities — and “can deliver environmental benefits and improve biodiversity”. Over recent decades the water quality of canals has significantly improved, “with otters increasingly present on the canal network”.
But is there a danger that residential density is damaging canal sites? When Unesco removed Liverpool’s World Heritage status in 2021, the organisation cited the Liverpool Waters project, which includes a 70-storey building as the centrepiece, as part of the reason for its decision. It argued that the development had resulted in “serious deterioration and irreversible loss of attributes” that define the city’s Outstanding Universal Value.
In Bristol, Historic England and the Bristol Civic Society have campaigned against the height and scale of tower buildings (up to 23 storeys) and questioned the wisdom of building so many homes in a medium to high-risk flood zone. And at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, heritage groups and locals successfully petitioned for several residential towers to be reduced in height. The approved design for the tallest, The Prow, is 27 storeys rather than the original 40.
The Canal & River Trust’s view is that canals are living landscapes, where heritage and innovation can coexist. “We are fighting an ongoing battle to maintain and protect this ageing infrastructure in the face of challenges such as climate change, while also working to unlock the canals’ great potential,” explains Stuart Mills, chief investment officer. Developments such as Port Loop in Birmingham and The Brentford Project on the Grand Union Canal in London, where residential buildings are inspired by warehouses, feel appropriate as they are referencing the past via their scale and form, Chaloner says.
Whittaker believes Liverpool was treated unfairly: the docks area had been derelict and closed to the public for decades; regeneration is an economic, social and political imperative for this part of the city, he says. Liverpool’s North Docks should not “remain frozen in time as a museum piece”, he adds. Both the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England remain actively involved in the Liverpool Waters project, which speaks volumes, he continues.
There are many tranquil stretches of Britain’s waterways, but in the city centre they should be vibrant and integrated into the places around them, Chaloner concludes. “A canal that is alive is so much more than water,” he says. “It’s a resilient and adaptable piece of infrastructure for people and nature.”
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