The plan for the first week of this epic adventure is to navigate some 55 miles, negotiating 64 locks, from the River Thames at Limehouse in London's East End to the quiet Buckinghamshire village of Marsworth.
When travelling by canal, there's a fairly accurate way of calculating how long a journey will take: add the number of miles to the amount of locks and divide by three. So for this first week to the first leg of my route northwards will take some 40 hours, which at eight hours cruising a day, five days a week, is more or less the standard that I am hoping to maintain throughout the 1,028 miles and 684 locks of my 13-week itinerary. This builds in contingency time for relaxation, excursions, accidents and emergencies.
Starting then in the heart of London's old docklands, now very much redeveloped as des res apartments, at Limehouse basin where the old Regent's canal locks into the Thames, week one is to follow a route that takes the canal north from the river then west to Paddington where it joins the Grand Union canal close to one of the largest construction sites in Europe - the redevlopment of the old Paddington basin. Built by John Nash, he of Regent's Park and Regent's Street fame, the canal runs parallel with the eighteenth-century New Road - the line of today's City, Pentonville, Euston and Marylebone roads - that was meant, but failed spectatularly, to halt the northward creep of the metropolis. Keeping a westward bearing from Paddington the canal meanders through the light industry of Kilburn and Acton before turning south at Greenford to pick up the old main line of the original Grand Junction Canal that had its outlet to the Thames at Brentford.
Running nearly 140 miles to Birmingham, the Grand Junction amalgamated with 11 other companies to become the Grand Union as late as 1929 in a last ditch but doomed bid to turn a profit. The route now hangs a hard right on to this M1 of the canal age and weaves past the back doors of yet more low-slung factories turning north proper to begin the hard climb up to the initial summit level with the first lock for nearly 20 miles. To the left, an arm heads west to Slough - built in the 1880s to carry London's detritus for burial in pits dug to provide clay for the insatiable appetite for bricks of the metropolis. It was one of the last narrow canals to be cut in Britain and, benefitting from decades of railway civil engineering, it has no locks but instead is carried virtually dead straight through cuttings and over embankments.
Onward and upward the main line goes past Uxbridge, Denham and Harefield to Rickmansworth, once a sleepy market town that was transformed by the coming of the canal into a centre for docks, stables and repair yards. A century or so on, it was transformed even more by being slap bang in the middle of Metroland, the almost mythic suburban social engineering of the Metropolitan Railway company's massive middle-class house-building programme of the 1930s.
Hurrying on through today's metropolitan suburbs, the dormitory towns of Hemel Hempstead and Berkhamstead that are so similar to so many such towns circling twenty-first-century London, the boat arrives exhausted and out of breath at the exquisitely beautiful three-mile cutting of the Tring summit and the first week's goal of Marsworth Junction, where a westward bearing arm heads off the 16 miles to Aylesbury - one of the most peaceful stretches of canal in the country - while northwards lies next week's journey.
Mike Holland will be writing weekly online dispatches from his canal journey around England. Thanks to the wonders of modern riverboat technology, you can email him at mike.holland@observer.co.uk
