MADRID
For more than three years, Pete Wilson slept in the back of his work van, eating from simple meals prepared on a gas camping stove there.
Come rain or shine, snow, sub-zero temperatures or whatever the climate in London could throw at him, the van was home during the workweek in London. Come Friday evening, that van would take him north, up the M1 motorway, to his family home in Derbyshire’s Peak District and where he used to work before being transferred to the capital.
“It was just too expensive to find a place to rent in London,” Wilson tells Gulf News.
Even a basic bedsit – a modest studio apartment – cost £1,500 (DH7,130) within easy reach of central London, he says. Add in electricity, water, basic television and internet – and a local government tax of close to £90 monthly, and Wilson was looking at close to £2,000 – as well as keeping his family’s home going and covering some of his son’s university expense, there simply was no other alternative.
But Wilson has now joined the ranks of an estimated 12,000 – and growing monthly – who live on canal narrowboats in and around London.
In the early days of the industrial revolution from around 1800 onwards, more than 3,000 kilometres of canals were built across Britain. These man-made waterways were used to transport raw materials and goods, linking inland cities up and down the UK with coastal ports. They reached their heyday in the 1860s. The mostly then horse-drawn barges lost out to the more efficient and powerful steam train network from the 1870s onward. But narrowboats – most are less than 1.8-metres wide – cornered a niche market in moving non-perishable goods slowly from canals-side factories to the inner cities. And over the past five decades, the narrowboats have become floating homes providing a leisurely way of seeing the British countryside.
Wilson picked up a 60-yer-old narrowboat that’s 11-metre’s long, is fitted with a bathroom and kitchenette, has one permanent bedroom and a table and bench in the small living room can be converted into a second double bed. There’s also a wood-burning stove for heating and room for a gas barbeque on the small stern deck.
“It cost me £15,000,” the 51-year-old Wilson says. “She needs a bit of work, some painting and a trip to the dry dock for a coat of bitumen on the [steel] hull – other than that, she’s fine.”
He reckons that when he retires in four years’ time he will recoup the outlay – or he might even hold on to it for his family to use for a holiday on Britain’s inland waterways.
“Now my family can come down to London and visit me for a change – and they have somewhere to stay.”
But living on the narrowboat does have some disadvantages. In many parts of the UK, permanent moorings can be had for £2,000 annually. Not so in greater London, where permanent moorings cost at least five figures for a 10-metre narrowboat.
The Canal & River Trust (CRT), a charity that’s responsible for running and maintaining the UK’s waterways, estimates that there are nearly 33,000 licensed narrowboat users in Britain.
In the London area alone, the rise in narrowboats has been dramatic over the past five years. In March 2012, the CRT says there were 2,326 boats moored in the capital. Two years later there were almost 3,000. By March of 2016, there were 3,662 boats, with an estimated 12,000 people living on the vessels.
“Boat living can be a fantastic way of life which many people love, but it comes with its own challenges – having to fill up with water, empty your toilets, do lots of hands-on maintenance and, if you don’t have a home mooring, moving your boat every 14 days to somewhere new –known as ‘continuously cruising’,” explains Joe Coggins, the national press officer for the CRT. “This can almost be like a part-time job. Sometimes people can get a bit of a shock, especially in winter, when they realise it’s not just a floating house,” he tells Gulf News. “So we advise that you should only move aboard if you really love the lifestyle.”
The CRT estimates that in 2016, there were 1,615 narrowboats in the London area alone that didn’t have permanent moorings”
“In London, especially in the more popular areas, there is a lot of competition for space,” Coggins says. “Canals are a finite resource and there has been a massive influx in the number of boaters wanting to come into London: I sometimes think of it as being like a big game of Tetris. As well as mooring space, it puts pressure on the infrastructure, facilities etc.”
The CRT is developing a London mooring strategy, working with local boaters and other stakeholders to try and address this issue.
For Wilson and others, however, who now consider the water their home, the savings and benefits of having a place to live – even if it means moving home every two weeks is worth the hassle.
“The boat has given me an affordable place to live and it’s a fun way of life too when I’m in London,” Wilson says. “Besides, who else gets to move their house every two weeks and meet new neighbours and get a room with a new view?”
