Funny thing is it’s not a proper lake, and not very old. It’s an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.
![Ducklings by South Norwood Lake [OC]](https://lemmy.stad.social/pictrs/image/f6834b08-f104-45bc-ba78-af2b8c2cf0b0.jpeg){kind=link}
South, North, Wood, Lake… Hmmm. Your ancestors weren’t imaginative in their naming strategies huh? (I come from New South Wales, so similar problem).
Funny thing is it’s not a proper lake, and not very old. It’s an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.