At the heart of the London Borough of Camden resides Camden Town, named after Sir Charles Pratt, the first Earl of Camden, a radical 18th-century lawyer and politician who acquired the land through marriage and started its development in 1791, where it began as barely more than a few houses alongside a main road of those he granted leases to. It did not become a significant location until the opening of the Regent’s Canal to traffic in the early 1800s, when the rise in transportation brought more employment opportunities to the land. The area was considered unfashionable until 1973, when the Camden Lock’s wharves and warehouses on the Regent’s Canal closed and began to convert into industries such as retail, tourism, and entertainment, and the Camden Markets, one of London’s biggest tourist attractions, was born, attracting approximately 250,000 people per week, even offering regular canal and waterebus rides as well.