Exploring London’s network of canals, rivers and docksides is to walk (run or cycle) through the capital’s history. Towpaths, quays and riversides are soaked in traces of the past - from Saxon beaches, Georgian warehouses or Victorian sewer pipes to exotic plants carried on passing barges. Here are vivid visual aids to London’s rises and falls in fortune, invasion, trade and industry.

There are ribbons of almost-rural green, screened from surrounding suburbia by graceful willows and poplars, vast expanses of water where whalers, the first freezer ships, and ocean liners docked and canals that cut through key moments in industrial history. Gilly Cameron Cooper, author of Walking London’s Waterways, shares some of her favourite discoveries at water-level London.

1. Rotherhithe Peninsula

The Thames at Rotherhithe has teemed with the vessels of trade and adventure through the centuries. In 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Rotherhithe for America in the Mayflower; thoroughbred 18th-century tea clippers strained at their moorings, before racing competitors to Australia; steamer packets ferried travellers to the Continent, and dirty British coasters carried cargoes of coal from the north.

Inland, great bodies of water were cut into docks. Massive blocks of granite that now edge an expanse of green park were once the quayside of Russia Dock. Greenland Dock is still a vast rectangular sheet of water. It was enlarged from one of London’s earliest enclosed docks that accommodated 120 sailing ships in the late 17th century, to become the main berthing for Arctic whalers, and later timber from the Baltic countries and grain from North America.