Kensington Canal

The Kensington Canal was a canal, about two miles long, opened in 1828 in London from the River Thames on the parish boundary between Chelsea and Fulham, along the line of Counter's Creek, to a basin near Warwick Road in Kensington. It had one lock near the Kensington Basin and wharves on the Fulham side, south of Lillie bridge. It was not commercially successful, and was purchased by a railway company, which laid a line along the route of the canal on the Fulham side. A second railway line followed in the filled-in littoral of the canal, thus one became London Underground's Wimbledon branch and the other, the West London Line.

Counter's Creek was a minor tributary of the Thames running south from Kensal Green to join the main river west of Battersea Bridge. Lord Kensington, William Edwardes, seeing the success of the Regent's Canal, asked his surveyor William Cutbush in 1822 to draw up plans to convert the creek into a canal, with the object of bringing goods and minerals from the London docks to the Kensington area, then a rural district isolated from London.

After some modifications, Cutbush's plan obtained Parliamentary sanction in 1824, and the Kensington Canal Company was incorporated in that year. William Edwardes and a group of his friends, including Sir John Scott Lillie, the second largest shareholder after Edwardes, were the proprietors; the cost of construction had been estimated as £7,969. The share capital of the company was £10,000 in one hundred shares of £100 each, and they had powers to raise an additional £5,000 if necessary.

However this was a gross under-estimate, and John Rennie estimated that more than £34,000 would be needed to complete the work properly, including the rebuilding of Stamford Bridge. Rennie's nominee, Thomas Hollinsworth, was brought in as surveyor to the Canal Company.

In May 1826 the Company obtained powers by another Act to raise a further £30,000. Notwithstanding this quadrupling of the anticipated cost of construction, the proprietors still entertained the notion of extending the canal northward to connect with the Grand Junction Canal at Paddington, involving eleven locks, was still under consideration.

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