Itinerant boat-dwellers on the waterways in London have been portrayed as a community
of like-minded people living alternative lives, sharing skills, resources, and space. This
paper complicates the neat presentation of a boating community or imagined community
through auto-ethnographic research as an itinerant boat dweller on the waterways in London and through seventeen in-depth interviews conducted within this population in 2017.
This research reveals how hierarchies of belonging are created through the exhibition and
acquisition of boating know-how and sanctioned through the body along gender lines.
The discussion furthers understandings of the lived experiences of itinerant boat-dwellers
in London.
KEYWORDS: narrowboats, canals, waterways, hierarchies of belonging, gender
Introduction
Itinerant boat-dwellers in London have been framed by the media as a convivial, tightknit, egalitarian community who were forced onto the waterways by the UK housing crisis (CityAM 2016; CNN 2018; BBC One 2019). Apart from Bowles (2014, 2015, 2016,
2017, 2019), this population has not received much academic attention, and the media’s
portrayal has not been interrogated. While criticism that human geography is too terracentric and neglects waterscapes (Anderson & Peters 2014; Anim-Addo, Hasty & Peters 2014) is being addressed by emerging literature on sea and oceanic water mobilities
(Kleinert 2009; Vannini 2012a; Vannini 2012b; Merriman 2015), the inland waterways,
particularly urban canals, have been largely overlooked. Where it exists, work on inland
waterways in the UK focusses on individual contemporary experiences of canal tourism
(Fallon 2012; Kaaristo & Rhoden 2017), volunteering (Trapp-Fallon 2007), and accessibility of waterways for leisure use in the urban and rural context (Pitt 2018).
57
The ethnographic research presented here looks at hierarchies of belonging in relation to practical knowledge acquisition and gender among Continuous Cruisers in London, which problematises existing presentations of a “boating community”. My research
suggests that the increasing numbers of people moving onto boats in London has caused
Continuous Cruisers to feel that overcrowding threatens to restrict current freedoms or
increase fees to a degree that makes their current way of dwelling unsustainable. This
creates ideas of fear, insecurity and scarcity among the population and leads to claims to
belong demonstrated by embodied forms of knowledge related to practical and technical
boating know-how. These claims to belong through boating competence are exhibited in
online groups and performed on the waterways creating hierarchies of belonging amongst
“old-timers” (boaters who have been living on board longer) and “newbies” (those new
on the canals). These hierarchies can be read in the abilities exhibited by Continuous
Cruisers, but are also experienced through gender-normative ideas around particular technical or practical skill-sets.
In this paper, I first set out the methodology of this research. I then describe my
position as a Continuous Cruiser and an academic, describing how I came to live on a
narrowboat. I then set out a wider context of the history of boat-dwelling and ideas of
“boating communities” on waterways in the UK. I move on to complicate presentations
of today’s boating community as a tight-knit population through which knowledge and
favours are exchanged freely. My research leads me to examine how the increase in boats
creates tensions and insecurity and creates claims to belong, sanctioned by boating expertise and longevity on-board. This relates to “new hierarchies of belonging” (Back 2012)
that emerge from fear and insecurity within certain groups. Participants describe how
boating know-how is articulated by gender identities and the bodies they occupy, causing
female participants to feel they lack skills, and male participants to feel an expectation
of having more boating ability than they do. I aim to show that by taking the gendered
and embodied hierarchies of belonging on London’s waterways seriously, this research
contributes to a deeper understanding of the lived experience of Continuous Cruisers and
warns against presentations of a “boating community” that threaten to obscure the lived
experience of Continuous Cruisers in London.
Methodology
In 2017, I conducted six months of mobile auto-ethography (Anderson 2006) among
Continuous Cruisers on the canals and rivers in London: from Uxbridge on the Grand
Union along the Paddington Arm, the Regents Canal past London Zoo to the Limehouse
Cut in Bow, including the Hertford Union that runs alongside Victoria Park and the whole
stretch of the River Lee. This research consisted of participant observation: living peripatetically on a narrowboat, interactions on the towpath and at lock gates with Continuous Cruisers and others using the waterway space. I also attended meet-ups through the
Facebook group London Boatwomen. The research included seventeen semi-structured
in-depth interviews with fourteen female and three male Continuous Cruisers living on
London’s waterways recruited through London Boatwomen, chance meetings on the
towpath and by interviewees recommending other boaters to interview. The participants
58
Anthropological Notebooks, XXV/2, 2019
Laura Roberts: Taking up space: Community, belonging and gender among itinerant boat-dwellers on London’s waterways
ranged from 24 to 35 years old and lived on their boat alone or in a couple with or without
young children (one had a new-born baby, another was pregnant with twins). Participants
had been living on their boats for varying amounts of time, between four months and five
years. Individuals’ experience of everyday hierarchies of belonging extends previous research on this group by suggesting that expertise and longevity on the waterways intersect
with gender and create feelings of inadequacy. Interviews were recorded and transcribed
verbatim, employing pseudonyms and censoring identifying features.
The boating context
There has been a long history of people creating place and belonging on and around the
canals in the UK. In what follows, I will describe how historically the values of boatpeople have been contrary to sedentary populations and outline some of the groups that
populate the waterways today. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the majority of the UK’s
canals were dug by cutting channels through the earth to create “navigations”, routes
linking commercial hubs across the country in order to fuel the Industrial Revolution.
The men who built them were known as navigators, or “navvies”. “Bargees” worked on
the navigations to transport cargo on horse-drawn boats around the country. The advent
of the railways in the mid-1800s saw workboats having to work much harder to compete,
causing more and more families to move onto boats full-time. Bargee families became
largely nomadic and dislocated from health services, as well as education and religious
organisations that controlled the housed population.
This way of life directly contravened the ‘values at the heart of sedentary, civilized life: permanence of relation, abodes and employment’ (Mayall 2004: 268). In addition, women and children were heavily involved in manual work, which conflated the
gendered spheres of domestic and wage labour and challenged the idea that certain work
and skills were appropriate only for working men. In this way, bargee families challenged notions of Britishness, identity and gender of the time (Matthews 2013). Matthews (2013: 139) argues that the decline of canal boat people in the late 19th century
was not solely due to an inability to compete with the “railway age” but also ‘motivated
by mainstream mistrust of nomadic modes of life, and fears about its consequences for
the “floating population” and anyone with whom it might come into contact.’ She posits
that the government did not protect the bargee way of life when canal transportation
rapidly declined following a boom in the road transport industry during the First World
War, an increase in unionisation, and a fall in the demand for coal. The final nail in the
coffin for the bargee way of life was the Transport Act of 1947, which saw most of the
canal network nationalised along with the railways and road transport. In this period of
decline, the inland waterways fell into disrepair. In the 1950s, a voluntary charity, the
Inland Waterways Association (IWA) began work maintaining, restoring and developing
the waterways for both recreational and commercial purposes (Bolton 1991; Blagrove
2006). Volunteers dubbed themselves “navvies”, forging an association with the original
navigation workers (Trapp-Fallon 2007). The number of boats on the canals and rivers
gradually increased from 1,500 craft licences issued on the canals in 1950 (Harrison &
Sutton 2003) to over 34,000 registered today (CRT 2019).
59
The increase in boats in urban areas like London has caused tensions in recent
years, especially with the growing popularity of boats with a Continuous Cruising licence. These licences were first issued in 1995 by the British Waterways who were the
authority that managed the waterways and were later reorganised into the Canal and River
Trust (CRT) and allowed boaters to live on the network without having to buy or pay rent
on a home mooring for the first time. Boats with this licence have to move to a new place
every two weeks and cover a minimum distance of 20 miles per year in one direction
(CRT, 2012). This overlapped with increasing house prices, and the cost of rent particularly in London that, in more recent years, has caused the city to be labelled as “unaffordable” (Hill 2014) and considerably narrowed peoples housing possibilities. Between
2012 and 2016, London saw a 57% increase in people living on boats (CRT 2016). This
increase has led not only to tensions between established and newer Continuous Cruisers
but also to arguments between different boating groups making claims to belong on the
waterways. For example, in recent years the IWA have called for the CRT to increase the
minimum distance that Continuous Cruisers are required to travel per year in order to
free up space in the city for all boaters. This includes holiday boaters who have seen the
city’s waterways become increasingly congested in recent years and who struggle to find
a visitor mooring (see Crisp 2018).
For Bowles (2015: 285), Continuous Cruisers make up the heart of the ‘boating community,’ with ‘marina dwellers, holidaymakers and enthusiasts’ at its periphery.
Kaaristo argues that Bowles presentation is ‘rather partial’ (2018: 142) and, in turn, states
that there is a ‘close-knit community on the canals that accommodates everyone’ from
canal enthusiasts and volunteers to liveaboards. Analysing boating in terms of Bourdieu’s
(1977) idea of habitus, a complex of acquired dispositions, she suggests the community
should be defined ‘through the commitment to the canals and possession of the habitus of
canal boating’ (Kaaristo 2018: 142), which creates an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson
1983), a socially constructed collective based on shared representations and narratives
that create a feeling of belonging.
Although it is clear that there has been a long history of people living and working on the UK’s inland waterways, I will argue that the concept of a “boating community”
today threatens to obscure or distract from the lived experience of individuals and their
perception of the group they constitute. My research findings on Continuous Cruisers in
London suggest that “boating community” elides the reproduction of embodied hierarchies of belonging that participants confront in their everyday lives. In what follows, I
will describe my entry into the field and then turn to my research findings to argue against
the presentation of a “boating community” that threaten to obscure the lived experience
of hierarchies on the waterways.
Entry into the field
In August 2014, my parents took out a bank loan on my behalf in order for me to buy a
60-foot steel narrowboat with my (now ex) partner. The idea was this; as we turned thirty,
we would escape the staggering rent we were paying to sleep in the living room of a twobedroom North London house with three other people. We would cheaply live in our new
60
Anthropological Notebooks, XXV/2, 2019
Laura Roberts: Taking up space: Community, belonging and gender among itinerant boat-dwellers on London’s waterways
home- by obtaining a Continuous Cruising licence from CRT. According to the terms
of this licence, we would have no permanent mooring and would have to move every
two weeks to a new place, covering a minimum of 20 miles in one direction per year in
order to meet the conditions of being on a “bona fide journey” (CRT 2012). We bought
a narrowboat called The Sorcerer in Birmingham for £28,000 and moved on-board immediately. It took two solid, meandering weeks under the blaze of the late summer sun,
travelling at four miles an hour, quite literally learning the ropes as we went before we
finally got within commuting distance to London. We soon realised that the acquisition of
skill came in the form of disaster. Some major lessons were learnt in calamitous episodes
in which pipes came loose, gaskets blew, and on more than one occasion the boat ran
aground: sticking us fast in the muddy shallow waters caused by the heat and lack of rain.
On each dramatic occasion, I was convinced that we would sink right then and there and
lose everything. Overnight, I felt like all my freedoms and ties had been turned on their
head; I had adopted responsibility for a new home but also a release from the tight grip of
the city and its relentless wage labour.
My ex is a carpenter and metalworker and extremely practically minded. I am
decidedly less so. We were both aware that we could easily split the work share down the
path of gender-normative least resistance. That is, I could surrender all practical, boathandling responsibilities to him and spend my energies on domestic tasks. He could deal
with The Sorcerer as a boat; I could deal with it as a home. Luckily this is not what happened, as both of us had commitments in London that meant we had to take it in turns to
cruise South while the other was in the city. I did parts of the journey alone or with my
nervous parents and got accustomed to remaining calm and being methodical in the face
of catastrophe. I gradually learnt to enjoy the bewildering responsibility of an 18-tonne
hunk of steel that happened to be my home. As we neared London and the commutes to
work got shorter, boat life seemed less precarious and the accumulation of competence
less stressful. We acclimatised to the material conditions and acts of dwelling we needed
to survive. The boat seemed to settle into new bodies occupying it and stopped rebelling
against having boating novices for owners. Without the financial responsibility I had to a
landlord, I was able to work one part-time job and study for a part-time master’s degree
in Social Anthropology.
Two years after I bought the boat, my relationship broke down, and I found myself to be a lone boat-woman. I unofficially renamed the boat The Sorceress and am now
perpetually maintaining, repairing and attempting to improve her. I experience waves of
loneliness and melodrama when things go wrong, but the fear of not being able to cope
without my practically minded ex has all but disappeared through the process of throwing myself into boat jobs like re-hauling my engine and changing my windows. I realise
that I am able to do things I would have never attempted before, because I have to. This
constantly reveals – and forces me to challenge – my own ingrained gender biases.
Being alone on the boat somehow intensifies my relationship with the waterways, which feel like a warm and quiet fold in the flesh of the city – a place that simultaneously offers its own brand of the peaceful sanctuary and fetid danger. These dark
margins are detached from the bright lights and hubbub of the city, ideal for menace and
61
crime but also a calm backdrop to cosy, cabin-like domesticities. Here, in the unlit shadows of the city, not surveilled by CCTV, every stranger can be imagined as dangerous.
This vulnerability is juxtaposed by the lights and chatter emanating from warm boats
with fires roaring and hatches open to the still, black water. From inside the boat, the call
of birdlife can sometimes be broken by the sound of arguments a few feet away on the
towpath. In this way, the waterways can be simultaneously a homely and an inhospitable
place. For support, I lean on the boatwomen around me. Being around these women has
made me reflect on stories I repeatedly hear about the unique treatment that comes with
the territory of being new to living on a boat and being a woman, and I have come to
understand myself amongst this social landscape. This compelled me to conduct ethnographic research on this group to try to understand better what wider lessons could be
drawn about presentations of a “boating community” through a focus on community and
gender on the waterways