Marcus Trower has seen a lot of changes to London’s canals over the eight years he has lived on his boat. Where once, even in the heart of the city, there was usually a grassy bank he could moor next to, there are now just smooth concrete slabs. Residential moorings have been taken over by businesses running bar barges and restaurant boats, and tall glass buildings have sprung up on the waterside, overshadowing the water. “No mooring here,” the signs say.
But for Trower, it is the level of abuse he receives in central London that makes him feel most unwelcome. “It ranges from being called a pikey to having stones thrown at my boat.”
The vast majority of London’s “continuous cruisers” – boaters like Trower who live on the city’s canals but move around regularly so they are not obliged to pay for an expensive permanent mooring – get harassed by local residents nowadays, he says.
Marcus Trower, from the National Bargee Travellers Association, with his son, Cillian. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/the Guardian
“They just don’t like us. I think it’s a lot to do with the developments in these areas. You don’t get harassed as much in areas which are not being developed.”
Few things symbolise the way our cities have transformed more than canals. Around the world, cities have woken up to the power of their urban waterways: from Milan to Manchester, the former economic arteries of industry are being turned into corridors for walkers, boaters and wildlife. Cafes and restaurants are proliferating and canalside living is newly chic – and newly costly.
As commercial interests muscle in on the last great undeveloped bit of Britain’s cities, Guardian Cities and the Observer wanted to take stock of a crucial moment in history, when we still have a choice: whether to turn canals into sanitised enclaves of wealth, or preserve them as a precious resource for all.
Chris Michael, Cities editor
London’s canals are being gentrified, he says: since the city hosted the Olympics in 2012, the character of formerly neglected areas of London by the canal has changed, with King’s Cross, Hackney Wick and Paddington undergoing particularly dramatic transformations. And while continuous cruisers get away with paying as little as £20,000 for their floating homes, a tiny canalside flat in these newly popular locations can now cost nearly £1m.
Trower, a spokesperson for the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA), thinks it is this economic disparity that is fuelling the conflict on the canals: “Life is hard on the water, but it’s obviously cheaper. Maybe they’re jealous of us. And when they look out of their posh, clean, clinical-looking flats, I think they want their view of the canal to look a certain way: pristine. They don’t want boats there – or maybe they only want to see a certain type of boat.” There are parts of central London he no longer moors in that he once called home.
Graham Ryder, 45, a plumber who has been continuously cruising on London’s canals for five years, also feels he is being displaced. “The waterways are being sold off to businesses. There are fewer and fewer places for us to moor, and more business boats. Property developers are taking away the rings we need to moor our boats on the canal.”
Both Ryder and Trower feel the Canal & River Trust (CRT), the charity responsible for maintaining the waterways in England and Wales, is part of the problem. The CRT issues the continuous cruising licences for London’s canals and owns about 40% of the city’s permanent moorings, which it leases off to the highest bidder at auctions. As a result, permanent moorings in London can cost as much as £20,000 a year and are rarely affordable for continuous cruisers. By contrast, cruising licences cost less than £1,250 a year and allow boaters to moor for free anywhere along the towpath for up to 14 days – as long as they can find a space.
And that is much more difficult than it used to be. As the price of property on land in London has risen to more than 14.5 times the average salary and neighbourhoods by the canals have become more fashionable, the number of continuous cruising licences issued by the CRT – and the number of people competing for places to moor – has dramatically increased. In 2012, only 638 continuous cruising licences were issued. By 2019, this number had soared to 2,208, a 246% increase. In total, the number of boats on London’s canals – including those with permanent moorings – has nearly doubled over the past seven years.
When Delta Gomersall, 26, moved to London from South Africa in 2016, she was shocked at the cost of renting and moved straight onto a boat. “I was mortified, especially when I saw the ratio of rents to salary. I wasn’t in a house for the first year and a bit that I was in the country. It never became affordable to move into a place, even when I started working.”
A floating hot tub makes its way along the Regent’s canal. Photograph: Richard Baker/Alamy
Gomersall, who works in recruitment and now lives in Birmingham, says the practice of using auctions for permanent moorings and the tighter restrictions for continuous cruisers are making boating more difficult and expensive.
Many of the newcomers are young professionals, according to Trower. “They cram into central London – you see boats double moored or even triple moored. They’re all young, new to the water.” There are fewer older, experienced continuous cruisers in the city nowadays, he says. “You don’t have the diversity you did before.”
The regeneration and growth in popularity of London’s canals has also coincided with a huge jump in the CRT’s earnings. Over the past five years alone, its annual income has risen by 25% to £204.9m.
Recently, it sold off 12 mooring spaces in Paddington, King’s Cross and Hackney Wick that were previously used by continuous cruisers. The new occupants of these permanent commercial moorings include leisure boat businesses, a bookshop, a restaurant and bar, and a floating community centre operated by a church.
The CRT has also restricted boats from running their diesel engines and banned them from burning anything in their stoves that gives off smoke in a newly created eco-mooring zone of the canal in Islington. The NBTA say this restriction, which makes it difficult and potentially more expensive for the boaters to heat their homes, amounts to “social exclusion eco-style”.
Canalside homes along Hertford Union Canal by Victoria Park in Hackney. Photograph: Gregory Wrona/Alamy
Sorwar Ahmed, who leads the CRT’s London boating team, argues that boaters need to “do their bit to be good neighbours. We want everybody to be able to enjoy the canals and in one section we are asking people to think about how they can make a greater contribution to the environment.” He said the CRT had installed rings into concrete by canals to create about 57 new moorings for continuous cruisers in Hackney and is investing in new facilities for boaters further out of the city. He added that the CRT does not allow developers to take rings away and privatise the towpath. “No mooring” signs were either being put up on privately owned land or because the CRT needs to ensure boats can safely navigate the waterway, as congestion on the canal increases.
However, he would not rule out selling off further mooring spaces along the towpath to businesses, pointing out that businesses bring in thousands of new people to the canals. “The canal is now a focal point, a destination. Before businesses got involved with regenerating areas ... parts of the canal were no-go areas because of crime.”
Tommo Stuart Thomson has set up two businesses on the canals in the past two years: Barge East, a bar and restaurant barge permanently moored in Hackney Wick, and SkunaBoats, which rents out floating hot tubs in Islington, typically to people in their mid-30s. Thomson, who once spent a year living as a continuous cruiser on London’s canals, says: “We’re attracting all sorts of people who would never visit the canal; lots of tourists from central London hotels and diners who traditionally wouldn’t travel to east London.”
The canals, he points out, were originally built for commercial operations - so businesses using the canals to make money is nothing new. He perceives the canals as valuable spaces for people in the city to unwind, not just to live. He does not think they are being gentrified: “There is still such a mix of people from all walks of life and you only have to walk along the canal to see that. ”
Formerly quiet areas of the canal in Paddington have become much livelier in the evenings, attracting more diverse, younger crowds, says Simon Ryder, who runs the charity The Floating Classroom, teaching local children about the ecology and heritage of the canals from a barge moored there.“Over the last three or four decades, the canal has been a semi-secret place, a haven for people who aren’t comfortable living elsewhere, and I worry that some of the character of the place will be lost. But on the other hand, way more people are aware of this amazing location we’ve got in London and how special it is.”
Graham Ryder accepts the need to share the canal with other users, but feels angry that his way of life is being eroded. “The canal is a protected public asset. It was rebuilt by volunteers when it fell into disrepair. Our community of boats made it safe. And now it’s economically viable for business, they want to flog it. The last bit of green countryside in London is being lost.”
The canal revolution series looks at what our changing waterways reveal about modern British cities. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use the hashtag #canalrevolution to join the discussion or sign up for our weekly newsletter
