A Boat with a View

I arrived in London in the fall of 2023 as a graduate student without a permanent place to stay. Average rents in the city increased by 11.5% in the following year, and today around 183,000 Londoners are homeless. I didn’t know any of the numbers at the time, but I still dreaded the prospect of finding a place to live. Many new arrivals without connections look for a place by trawling SpareRoom: a website for people without rooms to find rooms without people. Occasionally through the mess of postings, ads for houseboat sublets crop up — usually a narrowboat moored in East London, the owner traveling for a month or two and looking to capitalize on their vacation.

The boats I saw did not fit my criterion of “as-cheap-as-possible,” but it was hard not to fantasize about living on one. It wasn’t too uncommon to hear of some distant friend of a friend who made a home on a narrowboat or Thames barge. Living on a houseboat seemed like a charming way to experience London, but I was suspicious that the more luxurious short-term sublets on SpareRoom did not represent the reality for many.

Today, houseboats often appear in TV shows and movies set in London but, relegated to the background, they are easy to miss. Paddington 2, The Day of the Jackal remake, Baby Reindeer, Black Doves: they all feature such scenes. Slow Horses, an ongoing show about disgraced MI5 operatives, draws just a little more attention to the canals but also leaves more questions. One of the beleaguered agents has covert meetings with the MI5 deputy director on the towpath of Regent’s Canal. They meet when no one else is around except for the unseen people in the many narrowboats decorating the background. The agent says offhandedly: “I don’t know why they clean up the canals. There was a time you could find an oil drum or a corpse to use as a target.” Packed dispassionately into that throwaway line is an intriguing history about how the waterways have changed. 

For more than a century in the UK, people have lived on canal and river boats, pushed onto the water by a series of housing crises, and ignored by those on land. There is only an intermittent cultural interest in the lifestyle without a genuine regard for those living it, which means that the economic realities behind these lives are often disregarded, too, along with any notions of solidarity. The ongoing housing crisis in London is chipping away at the one constant in the history of the houseboat — the strong sense of community among outsiders that has persisted amid shifting perceptions of houseboats themselves.

The story that ends with the dissolution of community begins with the Industrial Revolution. Its momentum swept up a once unremarkable Welsh farming town and transformed it into one of the largest centers for iron production in the world. Merthyr Tydfil — named for a 5th century princess killed by pagans — became the site of four competing ironworks. Road-bound wagons were not enough to keep up with their rapid output and so canals, increasingly popping up all over the United Kingdom, were needed. One barge could carry over ten times more cargo than a wagon. During this period of “Canal Mania” between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 4,000 miles of canals were built, connecting hubs like London and the Thames to the rest of the UK. 

A significant portion of the canal connecting Merthyr Tydfil to Cardiff — a vital and heavily trafficked artery — was controlled by a single ironworks. To compete, rival ironworks built a nearly 10-mile-long tramroad to bypass the monopolized section of the canal. On February 21, 1804, that tramroad became the site of the first journey completed by a steam locomotive. Richard Trevithick, the inventor of the locomotive, lacked the business sense to capitalize on his ideas and died in poverty in 1833, but his creation ensured the eventual downfall of the canals. By the 1830s and ’40s canal firms were struggling to compete with steam-powered trains and had to drastically cut workers’ wages, depriving many of them of the opportunity to afford a home on the land: they and their families were forced to begin living on boats full-time.

During the 19th century there were an estimated 18,000 families living on the U.K.’s canals. Houseboat villages on the Thames, often filled with people moving to the water for reasons outside employment, weren’t established until the 1930s. Someone living on a narrowboat in the West Midlands might see themselves very differently than someone living on a Thames barge, but the commonalities in how they have been historically treated makes it useful to examine canal and river boat life together. 

The narrowboats on the canals are about 7 feet wide and usually up to 60 feet long. Many of them sport painted roses and castles, done in a particular style that has spread through the canal boat community over generations. On the Thames the boats are larger, but they can lack the visual charm of the narrowboats. Originally almost everyone on the water was there for work, and the community of boat dwellers was self-sustaining. Others started to seep in as trade on the waterways slowed down toward the end of the 19th century. The new arrivals who did not work on the water — either living on it full-time or enjoying without commitment — were disparagingly called “noddy boatmen” by those who did.

One such romantic was the writer, politician, and Thames lover A.P. Herbert, who owned and used a boat named Water Gypsy but lived in a house next to the mooring. He likely would have been close enough to feel the chill from the water, and likely also to feel the chill from those living on it. Many from traditional society were wary of those on the water, and many on the water were equally wary of outsiders. The protagonist of the 1939 film Water Gipsies, based on Herbert’s 1930 book, invites a love interest to visit her parents’ river barge; he responds: “I thought your father and mother wouldn’t have anyone on their barge that wasn’t born on the water.” 

L.T.C. Rolt — an engineer-turned-writer who first took a trip on the canals with his uncle in 1929 — was another notable noddy boatman, popularizing the life without living it. He used canals for cruises throughout the U.K, and in 1944 he released the book Narrow Boat about one such cruise during World War II. It is a conservative tribute to simpler, slow-paced living: “[these waterways] have recaptured for me that sense of place which swift transport, standardisation and ever more centralised urban government are doing their best to destroy.” He almost abandoned the project after facing rejection from publishers who worried there would not be enough interest in a story about the canals. By Rolt’s time many British waterways had fallen into disrepair from their waning industrial utility, but Narrow Boat’s surprise success inspired their revival. Rolt helped found the Inland Waterway Association, an organization that worked to clean up and restore British waterways, in 1946. Although his book brought attention to the canals, its unduly romantic outlook did not capture the realities of the boatman’s lot.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off the houseboat boom for workers on the water; a later housing crisis expanded the trend. World War II decimated half a million houses across England. Over 1.2 million homes were built between 1946 and 1951 to accommodate the millions of soldiers returning home, but in large urban areas like London this was not enough. People began turning to houseboats as an alternative. One site for these houseboats on the Thames is Chelsea Reach, just off Cheyne Walk. Cheyne Walk is one of the wealthiest roads in London, but after the war, the wealth stopped at the edge of the water. Thames sailing barges and Normandy landing boats were repurposed as temporary homes mainly used by former members of the Navy. The following ten years saw a mix of people fill the remaining moorings, with many drawn by the low cost of living and others drawn by the more romantic appeal that captured Herbert and Rolt. London’s canals were much slower to pick up inhabitants than the Thames, per Julian Dutton, author of the 2021 book Water Gypsies: A History of Life on Britain’s Rivers and Canals. Canals experienced a brief industrial resurgence during wartime throughout the UK, but in London they were targeted in bombings. 

The darker side of London’s waterways referenced in Slow Horses was similarly, though more intentionally, depicted in several mainstream British movies of the 1950s and ’60s. They replaced the sentimental portrayals from before the war with a sometimes cheeky and always cynical conception of the life off land. It was likely the result of popular tastes and a prior distrust for boatpeople, but aspects of the reality were at odds were those perceptions. Houseboat living, particularly on the Thames, was part of mainstream awareness at the time. Premier moorings were sometimes frequented by the likes of Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, and the actress Dorothy Tutin lived on one. Many, however, must still have held onto the seedy reputation of urban waterways and hung it on the people who lived there. 

The Naked Truth (1957), starring Peter Sellers, features a blackmailer who targets various London celebrities and publishes salacious stories about them in his tabloid magazine. His home, and makeshift headquarters, is a houseboat on the Thames. The Horse’s Mouth (1958), stars Alec Guinness as an esteemed painter recently released from jail. He’s a thief, conman, and general destructive force who lives on a Thames barge. The movies, and others like them, reinforce the status of boatpeople as malcontents seeking to disrupt society, rather than those being kept at a distance from it.

Few honest portrayals of the houseboat lifestyle in London exist outside of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 novel Offshore. Her book takes place on Battersea Reach, where she once lived on a barge in the 1960s with her daughters. Although her book is fictionalized, it offers a unique perspective — accounts from those who actually lived on the water are sparse. Offshore won Fitzgerald the Booker Prize but she was labeled dismissively in the Evening News as “The Original Boat Person,” and described as a “dotty and endearing sort of lady” who is “more informed and less vague than she appears on first sight.” The book patiently depicts the humanity of characters who might otherwise be dismissed as eccentrics, just as Fitzgerald was. In one tragic scene, Willis — a painter living among the eclectic cast of people on the Reach — celebrates the sale of his boat, only for it to sink before he has a chance to finalize the deal. He is stripped of his home and possessions, but the others on the Reach make sacrifices to help him. Writers before Fitzgerald overly romanticized the life, minimizing its hardships. She, instead, acknowledges the hardships, lending a more poignant tilt to the book’s romantic impressions of community. 

Today, the community that sustains houseboat living is being split apart. London’s waterways have been filling up since the 2008 recession. The Canal & River Trust — the spiritual successor of the Inland Waterway Association — claims that the number of boats in London has more than doubled in the past ten years. Now, the wealth that once stopped at the water’s edge has seeped over and brought the housing crisis with it. Boat dwellers with less financial wiggle room are being priced out or evicted from their moorings.

A permanent mooring in London can currently command annual fees upward of £15,000, paid to the Canal & River Trust or to private groups like the Chelsea Yacht and Boat Company. People on moorings do not have the same protections as traditional renters and have very little recourse if their fees get raised extravagantly. On the canals, many avoid permanent mooring fees by obtaining a “continuous cruiser” license. These people are required to relocate every two weeks and, without a stable address, can face difficulty accessing healthcare, registering to vote, and opening bank accounts. Access to emergency services and police assistance is another issue, even for those with a permanent mooring. UK addresses use postal codes that can be so specific that they vary by individual building. Moorings do not have the same system — responders may not know exactly where to go. 

There is also a minority of longer-term houseboaters who do not own their vessels. Sam Forbes wrote a 2014 article in the Guardian about his experience renting a room in “London’s houseboat slums” where “basic survival became exhausting.” For the desperate, the slower pace of houseboat living does not grant the charming escape sought by many, but instead can become oppressive. 

Some suspect the reason they are being pushed out from their moorings is because of commercial interests that want to cater to luxury houseboats. A listing for a £625,000 houseboat on RiverHomes — a real estate agency specializing in “waterside homes” — evokes many of the romantic sentiments that characterized the accounts of Herbert and Rolt. It reads: “A Unique Opportunity to Own a Piece of London’s Maritime History! If you’re seeking a distinctive riverside home with charm, convenience, and a touch of adventure, this converted Thames Tug is a must-see.” Julia Pittam, featured in the 2016 Thames Festival Trust documentary Life Afloat, speaks of her experience getting evicted from her mooring after private owners took it over: “Every couple of years they select a handful which is enough to divide everyone. If it was the whole pier everyone would unite and protest.” Those who once would have turned to the water for housing may have to look to the land.