Paddington Waterside
The Paddington Waterside Partnership is the body coordinating regeneration of the Paddington Special Policy Area around Paddington Station in London. The project covers an area almost the size of Soho, creating of about 10,000,000 square feet (930,000 m2) of space between 1998 and 2018.
It consists of 13 individual projects in the triangle of land between Praed Street, Westbourne Terrace and the A40 Westway, most notably PaddingtonCentral and Paddington Basin. The Independent has described it as "the largest central London redevelopment scheme since the Second World War".
The Paddington Arm of the Grand Junction Canal opened on 10 July 1801, linking Paddington to the Bull's Bridge junction near the future site of Heathrow Airport. The Grand Junction (now part of the Grand Union Canal) was the final link in a chain of canals that reduced the distance from London to Birmingham from 269.5 miles (434 km) in 1789 to 138.5 miles (223 km) in 1805; terminating the canal at Paddington gave easy access to main roads into London and the level route meant no locks were needed on its 13.5-mile (22 km) length. In contrast the Regent's Canal needed 12 locks for the 86-foot (26 m) descent from Paddington to the Thames at Limehouse.
The canal was an instant success, with warehouses and housing springing up around it. Canal traffic increased further when the Regent's Canal linked Paddington to the Port of London in 1820, but Paddington Basin was "practically killed" as a port as business was lost to wharves such as City Road Basin that were closer to the docks and the City of London. Paddington regained importance as a transport interchange with the arrival of the railway in 1838.
Canal traffic transferred to the railways during the nineteenth century and fell away completely after World War II; the closure of the Regent's Canal Dock in 1969 marked the coup de grâce. A similar switch from rail to road in the second half of the twentieth century left the Paddington goods yards redundant by the early 1980s. The land became derelict, with no public access to the canal land until 1987. The Paddington Special Policy Area was designated in 1988.
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