A Palette Made of Pavement: Hunting Colour from the Canal to Kentish Town

Colour in Camden rarely turns up in neat little families. It arrives in arguments: rust bleeding through a canal railing, a mint-green shutter wedged next to a burnt-orange skip, the bruised lilac of a mural somebody has tried, and failed, to scrub off. This is a walk for anyone who has ever stood in a yarn shop, a pottery suppliers or a paper shop and felt their own taste quietly dissolve. Two and a bit miles, no ticket, no guide, and a notebook that ends up messier than you planned. Think of it as a workshop you run yourself, with the street as tutor.

Before you set off

Start at the top of the Regent's Canal near Camley Street Natural Park, where the towpath is wide and the water still looks like water rather than a mirror for scaffolding. Finish at Kentish Town station, or in a pub near it if the light has gone. Around two and a half miles; ninety minutes if you march it, three hours if you do it properly.

Take a cheap watercolour fan, or one of the free paint colour charts from a DIY shop. A small notebook. A glue stick. A pencil. A bag for clean scraps you find already loose on the ground — never pull anything off a wall, a railing or somebody's skip. Your phone is allowed, but not as the main event.

Go before eleven if you can, and pray for cloud. Direct sun flattens everything into the same high-contrast mush; a flat grey sky is a free lightbox.

Leg one: towpath rust and narrowboat teal

The first stretch is all honest decay. Black-and-white chevrons on the lock gates. A narrowboat painted teal, then oxblood, then a cream that has gone the colour of old teeth. Corrugated iron doing that thing where orange meets grey and the grey is losing.

Nadia runs a small ceramics studio off Royal College Street and walks this stretch most weeks. Her rule is simple: no photographs for the first twenty minutes. "I write down three words and a ratio," she says. "Rust, cream, tar. Sixty, thirty, ten. If I take a picture first I stop looking — and the picture is always wrong anyway. The screen warms everything up."

Project prompt, knitting: a plain hat or cowl in galvanised grey, with a single rust stripe and a cream rib. The trick is keeping the grey slightly green rather than blue, or it reads as school uniform. Hold two greys together if you can't find the right one on its own.

Leg two: the market, where colour shouts

Through Camden Lock and into Hawley Wharf, the palette changes gear. Tarpaulins. Vinyl banners. The acid green of a bubble tea sign next to the pillarbox red of a phone-case stall. A doughnut counter in a pink that has clearly never met a meadow. Some of it is horrible, and that's the point — horrible colours are useful. They teach you where the edge is.

Priya makes collage from torn paper and market detritus, and teaches at a studio in Kentish Town. She doesn't name colours on the walk. "Names are traps," she says. "Call something 'sage' and you've already decided what it is. I number them instead. Colour three, colour seven. Then I cut chips to match and stick them in the book, and a month later I can see which ones were actually any good."

Project prompt, collage: a six-square grid. Five colours pulled from the market, plus one deliberately ugly note — a fluorescent sticker, a strip of hazard tape. Mount them; don't blend them. If the ugly one wins the grid, you've learned something worth keeping.

Project prompt, textiles: a quilted pouch in tarpaulin blue, scaffold-net orange and bin-liner black. Use the tarpaulin as the outer and something soft inside. If you're hand-sewing, a heavier needle and a thimble — the coated stuff will fight you.

Leg three: Kentish Town Road and the good kind of peeling

Up Kentish Town Road the colours get older and quieter. The deep green of an old greengrocer's frontage. A cream-and-maroon parade that hasn't been repainted since decimalisation. The grey-pink of a launderette. A minicab office in a yellow that only works because the pavement is filthy.

Look for strata. Paint goes on in layers and comes off in layers, and a good glaze test looks exactly like a bad shopfront. Don't scrape anything. Draw the layers instead — a pencil rectangle divided into bands, roughly at first, then properly.

Project prompt, ceramics: three thin washes of the same base over a white tile, each one a shade darker, and see where the edges bleed. "I stopped trying to invent palettes and started copying buildings," Nadia says. "Buildings have already solved the problem of what goes next to what. Somebody was paid to solve it."

The bit about photos

Photos are not evidence. They are opinions with a white-balance problem. If you want a record you can actually work from, make a palette card: a strip of grey board with squares of colour painted in on site, matched to the thing in front of you. It will be wrong. Correct it there and then, in the actual light, and write the street and the hour beside it. Note the weather too — a colour seen in November drizzle is a different colour by June, and it's worth knowing which one you fell for. Smells help as well, oddly. Wet stone, hot sugar, diesel. The nose remembers the afternoon and drags the colour along with it.

Take it home and make something small

The temptation is to come back with forty ideas and make none of them. Pick one leg, one palette, one object. A swatch. A test tile. A six-square collage. A dyed cotton tote, if you're brave, using onion skins from a Kentish Town greengrocer rather than anything foraged from a canal bank — which is both illegal and covered in things you don't want in a dye pot.

Practical notes

The towpath is mostly flat but narrow near the lock, and the cobbles in the Stables are uneven: fine in trainers, harder with wheels. Kentish Town Thameslink has lifts; the Tube side doesn't. Buses 134, 214 and 393 will get you home if the rain arrives early, which in November it will. None of it costs a penny, which is the other reason to go. The best colour reference library in London is currently free, open all hours, and genuinely doesn't care whether you can draw.