It’s a typical morning. Our home sways gently as my husband goes to turn the gas canisters on and our ancient heating system bubbles up. Our toddler cosies in his pirate-themed bedroom cuddling our giant dog while I vacuum the condensation off the inside of the windows. Meanwhile my husband takes our full camping toilet up to the drop-off point as though he is off to work and carrying a suitcase. Indeed, in another world, he could be wielding a briefcase, since we live beneath the shining silver sceptres of Canary Wharf. Except our home is a 50ft narrowboat and, somehow, we get along beautifully.
It is, as my husband says, a very fancy kind of camping and it is worth saying it is also a personal choice – our mooring fees could get us a very nice flat in most parts of the UK. But it is a fascinating way of life we always wanted to try.
On our marina there are enormous boats with dishwashers and wide-screen TVs and there are also fixer-uppers, including a young couple renovating, who only have plywood over their door as I write. Ours is roughly in the middle, the infrastructure is solid but we don’t have a fridge or a washing machine, let alone a telly. It takes work to make it comfortable but it can be very cosy. We invested in the warmest bedding we could, rechargeable lanterns, the best quality coal for the stove and, essentially, good sheepskin slippers.
One thing we were not expecting was becoming so close so quickly to this disparate floating community of artists, bankers, film directors, chefs, actors and teachers. On my son’s third birthday we held a party and fellow boaters stopped by for a slice of Barbie rainbow cake. For Halloween, a fellow marina mum organised a trick or treat around the fairy light strewn pontoons. It was quite the most beautiful thing to watch our little boys, a witch and astronaut, stand on the decks and pocket their sweeties from the lit up doorways of the boats.
This wasn’t always the plan. In January we were living in Glasgow and nearly bought an ex-local authority flat in the city’s hip Southside. When that fell through unexpectedly and our landlord put our rental flat on the market, we decided to fulfil a lifelong dream and try boatlife before our little boy needed to be in nursery school.
We travelled down to Yorkshire and viewed a beautiful shiny red and blue boat, made an offer, got rid of 80 per cent of our possessions and bought armpit length rubber gloves (you don’t want to know, but can probably imagine, what they are for) and committed to a new sort of day to day. Sadly, when our shiny blue and red boat was lifted out of the water for its pre-purchase survey, it was not quite so shiny underneath. In fact, it was “corroded and pitted” – words you never want to hear in relation to a boat. So a near miss, but a lucky one, that stopped us from spending our life savings on a home that might have sunk.
Luckily, a kind writer showed generosity beyond all reason and offered us his summer boat to live on while we searched for one of our own. Because the first winter as a liveaboard is notoriously hard, we wanted to make life easier by not having to move every fortnight, and so miraculously secured a rare-as-hen’s-teeth mooring in central London. Now we walk around the shining, sanitised, slightly space age, streets of Canary Wharf in our oil-stained dungarees and chunky waterproof boots, rubbing shoulders with bankers in thousand pound suits, then return to our tiny home, where for some reason (we sincerely hope it’s rust) the water from the tap runs chocolate brown, and so we wash our hands with bottled water and take communal showers in the shower block.
I’d be lying if I said it was an easy way of life and we’re still deciding if it’s our long-term plan. Currently we still have no clean running water, only half the lights work and I wash dishes by boiling a kettle filled from an outside tap on the stove top. We’re also lucky we never moved onboard hoping to economise because with mooring and licence costs, insurance, gas, coal and the many tradesmen we need when things can and do go wrong, it pretty much evens out to land-living expenditures.
Many people assume boatlife is cheap and idyllic when the reality is far from that. But for now, at the end of each day we feel truly satisfied with what we have accomplished. We are so much closer to nature and in the morning, ducks peck at the side of our boat for breakfast crumbs. When the storms come, and you’re only a few millimetres of wood and steel away from the elements, cosy by the stove and under a blanket cuddling your toddler, it’s hard to imagine a more gentle way of life. More than this, in London it’s like you’re part of the city but also completely removed from it – some locals don’t even know that our marina of a hundred boats exists.
So, it has been a year of near misses but we’re glad that this arrow hit the target, giving us the most extraordinary experience. We have learned so much. When I ask my kid what his favourite part about the boat is he says, no hesitation, “cuddles’” but I think what he means is the family is so much closer. I agree having this time together has been priceless.
My landlord evicted our family, so we've moved onto a narrowboat
6
0
17.11.2023
It’s a typical morning. Our home sways gently as my husband goes to turn the gas canisters on and our ancient heating system bubbles up. Our toddler cosies in his pirate-themed bedroom cuddling our giant dog while I vacuum the condensation off the inside of the windows. Meanwhile my husband takes our full camping toilet up to the drop-off point as though he is off to work and carrying a suitcase. Indeed, in another world, he could be wielding a briefcase, since we live beneath the shining silver sceptres of Canary Wharf. Except our home is a 50ft narrowboat and, somehow, we get along beautifully.
It is, as my husband says, a very fancy kind of camping and it is worth saying it is also a personal choice – our mooring fees could get us a very nice flat in most parts of the UK. But it is a fascinating way of life we always wanted to try.
On our marina there are enormous boats with dishwashers and wide-screen TVs and there are also fixer-uppers, including a young couple renovating, who only have plywood over their door as I write. Ours is roughly in the middle, the infrastructure is solid but we don’t have a fridge or a washing machine, let alone a telly. It takes work to make it comfortable but it can be very cosy. We invested in the warmest bedding we could, rechargeable lanterns, the best........
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