Narrowboat Life: Discover Life Afloat on the Inland Waterways

For Karen

Love of my life, who throughout the writing and photographing of this book has acted as a sounding board, critical ear to sporadically read passages, honest eye to a myriad of pictures, and enthusiastic supporter at every bend. What a happy adventure this life together has been! Long may it continue.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 WHAT’S IT LIKE... LIVING ON A NARROWBOAT?

2 HOW SAFE IS IT?

3 IS IT COLD IN THE WINTER?

Step Aboard... A recycled, repurposed narrowboat

4 HOW MUCH DID YOU PAY FOR YOUR NARROWBOAT?

5 HOW GREEN IS LIVING ON A BOAT REALLY?

- Green Tips: A greener galley

- Green Tips: Rudimentary to radical recycling

- Green Tips: Eco energy

Step Aboard... A narrowboat designed for escape

6 DID YOU PAINT IT YOURSELF?

7 DOES HE (THE CAT, DOG, PARROT) LIVE ON THE BOAT?

Step Aboard... A well-read ark

8 HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO LIVE ON A NARROWBOAT?

Step Aboard... A cabinet of curiosities

9 FOUR CANNY QUESTIONS... ABOUT CONTINUOUSLY CRUISING

- How do you receive post?

- How do you see a doctor?

- How do you use the internet?

- How do you hold down a job?

GLOSSARY

Narrowboats tied up on a tranquil curve of the Thames near Bampton.

INTRODUCTION

Narrowboat at the end of the rainbow, Great Bedwyn, Kennet & Avon Canal.

Entering a lock standing on the cabin roof requires expertise and clear communication with the helmsman, near Wilton Brail, Kennet & Avon Canal.

Living and cruising aboard a narrowboat within Britain’s intimate inland waterways is a special way of life. If you are up for it, each season can become a great adventure. Living afloat often feels like cheating at ‘ordinary life’ and it is a common sentiment among liveaboards that moving back on to land is difficult to imagine.

When you live aboard a boat you can choose your view and change it as you like. Of course, it helps if you enjoy waterside scenery! If you like variety in your company, the waterways offer a genuine, helpful and enormously interesting and diverse community. If you value independence, you will find scope for expressing it in spades. If you enjoy the outdoors, or pine for the countryside, you will discover it right there outside your portholes and one step from your deck. And chances are that making a boat your home will lessen your impact on that beautiful environment, almost by default.

The boating life usually requires you to expend a bit more physical energy than you would living on land, something most boaters consider a good thing. Driving the boat and taking it through locks requires stamina, and at times a little extra oomph. As does relaying your groceries from a shop across town to the canal or river ... along the towpath ... and into your galley.

Continuously or intermittently cruising (as opposed to being permanently tied up on a fully-serviced residential mooring) is a form of living off-grid and requires a certain level of self-sufficiency to be viable and comfortable. Water and diesel tanks need to be routinely topped up, propane canisters replaced, waste emptied, electricity generated and the engine serviced. None of these things are beyond the wit and skill of anyone, it just takes a little planning.

There has recently been an increased interest in living on boats for economic reasons, especially as house prices continue to climb beyond the reach of many hard-working people. The fact that a second-hand boat can be bought for one-tenth of the price of a second-hand house makes you sit up and think. If you already own a property, the maths seem loaded in your favour if you dream of a quieter, downsized life. Of course boats are not houses, their value rarely increases, and living in a corridor-sized space seriously inhibits natural urges to consume your way to happiness.

I think my best advice would be: live on a boat only if you really want to live on a boat. That said, it’s difficult to know beforehand what this is like, so one of my aims in writing and photographing this book is to help you decide whether living afloat might be right for you.

A well-equipped stern.

The big BOATY questions

This book has been inspired by, and attempts to answer, a host of questions I have fielded from a huge variety of curious, excited, bemused and uncomprehending strangers, friends and colleagues about what it’s like to live on a narrowboat. After ten years of cruising and living aboard a 53-foot narrowboat it has been fascinating to discover that the same core questions surface time and again. I have also found it thoroughly satisfying that many of these inquiries are not of the sensible ‘how-to-do-it’ variety, but playful, whimsical, even sceptical queries about the waterways lifestyle that reveal genuine insight.

There is the near-inevitable, ‘Is it cold in the winter?’ It seems that half the population worries about being chilly, damp and miserable aboard something akin to a floating tent. Then there is the wary, ‘Is it safe to live on a boat?’ and the down-to-brass-tacks question, ‘How much did you pay for your boat?’ (or, more tactfully, ‘What’s a narrowboat worth?’). More recently I’ve had many people ask, ‘How much does it cost to live on a narrowboat – surely it’s cheaper than a flat?’ Some of those concerned about the environment enquire: ‘How green is it, actually, living on a boat – you run big diesel engines don’t you?’ But there is also the spontaneously gleeful, ‘Does he live on the boat?!’ (pointing to your cat, dog or parrot), while a surprising number of aesthetically-knowing towpath wanderers ask, ‘Did you paint the boat yourself?’ Finally, there are the canny continuously cruising-related questions, such as, ‘How do you receive your post?’ and ‘How do you hold down a job if you are always moving?’ Read on, for all will be revealed.

More generally, towpath passers-by have also expressed curiosity about what narrowboats are physically like on the inside. How are the rooms laid out? Do you have proper appliances? How does everything you own fit into such a small space? To address these sorts of questions I approached a variety of liveaboard narrowboaters with beautiful and interesting boats, to see if they would be willing to talk about their boat’s interiors and clever features, and how their layouts supported their different lifestyles ... and allow me to photograph their floating homes to show off to the world!

Well, I think it is a tribute to the friendliness, goodwill and flexibility of liveaboard boaters that everyone I asked was thrilled to ‘invite us aboard’ to give us a peek behind the portholes. For this I will always be grateful, and I am really excited to include them in the special Step Aboard... sections. I have also included an inside view of our own modest 53‑foot narrowboat, to demonstrate how liveaboard space can be truly maximised. I hope you enjoy your visits.

The inland waterways are home to a variety of fascinating liveable craft. My experience is of narrowboats, but most of what you find here can be equally applied to living on and evaluating widebeams (‘wide narrowboats’), motor cruisers and small Dutch barges.

Widebeam reflected in the cabin side of a narrowboat at West Mills, Newbury, Kennet & Avon Canal.

The QUEST for a LIVEABLE boat

My partner Karen and I enjoy our narrowboat as much now as we did during those fresh autumn days when we first moved on board. We spent four years looking at second-hand boats before finding the one – a boat we could fit into, enjoy and afford.

Approaching Blake's Lock at Reading, where you leave the River Thames for the River Kennet, and the Kennet & Avon Canal.

To begin with, we corresponded with brokers and private individuals, sifted through canal magazine adverts, scrutinised boating websites, and simply walked the towpaths and chatted with whoever looked ‘boaty’ and knowledgeable. I even visited a couple of boats with ‘For Sale’ signs in their windows on the Thames – travelling by inflatable kayak. Astonishingly (it now seems) we visited well over a hundred boats: in marinas, down lost cuts, tied up on fast-flowing rivers and abandoned in backwaters. Of course, the more we looked, asked questions and pried into boats’ inner workings, the more discerning we became. We also became more confident about organising a survey and making an offer.

If you think that the boating life might be for you then there is some real, hands-on guidance in this book to help you to understand what you’re looking at when faced with a boat, and how to evaluate what it’s actually worth, and have a good idea of the real costs involved in living afloat. This should save you time when deciding which boat is exactly right for you and how you want to live on it.

Winter sun setting on Harefield Marina, beyond the suburbs of west London. Only shallows separate the marina from the Grand Union Canal, giving the appearance of cruising across a lake.

The PHOTOGRAPHY

Misty morning walk, Abingdon Lock moorings, River Thames.

By intuition and profession I am a photographer and graphic designer. I have been making and capturing images of Britain’s inland waterways for over a decade, originally by following the towpaths on a mountain bike loaded with camera and camping gear, then with an inflatable (and portable) kayak, and now from the comfort of our narrowboat home nestled deep within the waterways world.

Most of the photographs here reflect our recent cruising patterns throughout the southeast, south and midlands of England, taking in the Grand Union Canal and London, the River Thames from tidal London to Lechlade, River Wey Navigation, the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Oxford Canal and GUC Leicester Line.

The colour, nature, heritage, craft and people of the inland waterways are a photographer’s dream. Even if you decide that living on a boat may be too confining a lifestyle for your taste, I hope you experience some of the joys these beautiful and fascinating waterways offer through this collection of photographs.

Jim Batty

West Mills, Newbury, 2019

Flat Bottomed Girl setting off into the Oxfordshire countryside at dusk, Oxford Canal. Punny humour has a curious habit of mixing with the sublime on the inland waterways.

1

What’s it like… LIVING on a NARROWBOAT?

A line of liveaboard narrowboats tied up along the Kennet & Avon Canal at Great Bedwyn.

Living on a narrowboat is a WONDERFULLY ROMANTIC way of slowing your pace of life down, being intimate with the British countryside, having the freedom to shift your view as and when you desire, while being part of a GENUINE AND COLOURFUL COMMUNITY. As a nice counterbalance to all this, it can also involve a bit of work.

Butty and motor: a remarkable narrowboat pair breasted up at Braunston, Grand Union Canal.

ROMANTIC and simple, sophisticated and cutting-edge

Beauty can be found in the inland waterways vessels themselves – still influenced by traditional boat-building design and decoration going back to the 18th century – brightly alive with painted roses and castles, diamond patterns, contrasting primary colours and stripes, flashes of brass, seductively curved bows and graceful cabin rooflines. In a world dominated by the immensity and impersonality of its public buildings, transportation systems and maze-like bureaucracies, you cannot help but envy the contained, human scale of a narrowboat, decorated with playful panache and personal style. Whether viewed from grey urban ramparts or the green verges of open countryside, the sight of a floating toy-box dressed up in crayon colours can only inspire romantic wonder at what it must be like to call such a thing ‘home’.

Charm can also be found in the language of the canals and rivers. Common terms include: ‘winding’ (pronounced like the blowing wind, meaning to turn a narrowboat around); ‘tumblehome’ (the slope of a cabin side); ‘butty’ (an unpowered boat usually towed behind a motor); and ‘crabbing’ (driving a boat forwards at an angle, usually into a stiff wind). This is a world where ‘galleys’ and ‘gangplanks’ and ‘gauges’ and ‘gunwales’ still regularly feature, as do ‘stern glands’ and ‘stop-gates’, ‘rubbing-strakes’ and ‘weed hatches’.

And if you look with a sympathetic eye, a certain allure can be found in the industrial heritage that surrounds these inland waterways. Its history can be read from the regional variety of its architecture: bridges, locks, warehouses, quays, tunnels, aqueducts and canalside cottages. It can be enjoyed through the clever mechanical apparatus at locks that still continue to keep the system running and boats moving.

Bowler hat on a tug. Some boaters do like to dress up!

Despite these idyllic aspects, it would be a big mistake to equate living on a narrowboat with living in the past. Inland waterways boating is a curious mixture of heritage and 1950s community spirit fused with modern eco-awareness and cutting-edge technology. If you decide to live by candlelight on your narrowboat it will be little remarked upon in the boating community; most of your neighbours will understand the romantic attraction. But they themselves are far more likely to be investing in convenient, low-voltage LEDs to minimise power consumption.

Two tipcat and button rope fenders on the stern of a traditional working narrowboat.

Consider some of those great, traditional-looking narrowboats you see chugging along the cut, with a cosy boatman’s cabin at the stern and decorated with lace curtains and brass fixtures, colourful hand-painted signage across their cabin sides, and a classic Gardner, Lister or Russell Newbery engine slowly thudding away in their engine rooms. Look a little closer though – perhaps at the back of a cupboard or beneath a bench seat – and you will probably find an electronic 230-volt inverter tapping a large hidden bank of batteries to power a microwave oven, washing machine, stereo and flat-screen TV – conveniences found neatly tucked away behind gingham curtains and hand-crafted cabinetry.