Cumberland Basin (London)

The Cumberland Basin was once a vital industrial artery of London, functioning as a dead-end spur of the Regent's Canal. Constructed in the early nineteenth century, this waterway was specifically designed to feed the nearby Cumberland Market, which served as the city's primary hub for the trade of hay and straw. Barges laden with thirty tons of fodder would navigate this arm to supply the cavalry horses at the Albany Street barracks and the wider needs of a rapidly growing city. The basin was a landscape of intense labor, lined with wharves, warehouses, and an enormous underground icehouse capable of storing fifteen hundred tons of ice.