Wharf Road lies between and runs parallel to Wenlock Basin and City Road Basin. These canal basins are expanses of waterway that allow boats to turn, moor or unload cargo, away from the traffic of other vessels. The eponymous wharf was a structure on the bank of The Regent’s Canal where boats docked to load and unload cargo or passengers. In the nineteenth century, visitors to the canalside wharf would have experienced the sights and sounds of industrial Britain, its warehouses and goods arriving from across the country.

The Regent’s Canal opened at 11am on 1st August 1820. It had cost £772,000 to build – twice the original estimate. 120,000 tons of cargo were carried in the Canal’s first year. Horsfall (later renamed Battlebridge) basin (now the site of the London Canal Museum) opened two years later in 1822. 

The main centre of trade on the waterway was the Regent’s Canal Dock, a point for seaborne cargo to be unloaded onto canal boats. The second most important traffic centre, handling mainly incoming inland freight, was City Road Basin, situated alongside Wharf Road. This gives some indication as to how lively and noisy the road would have been in the early part of the nineteenth century surrounded by people, boats, goods, and horses. 

In 1825, John Edwards began construction work on what was to become Wenlock Basin. Wenlock Basin was privately owned and opened in August 1826. In 1832 John Edwards Vaughan, the son of the original owner, extended Wenlock Basin to a total length of 360 yards.