Fielding was limping along the canal towpath last week to visit his favourite boat, the floating bookshop Word on the Water. It is stuffed with reasonably priced books, his favourite music drifts out, poetry and live acoustic music performances are staged on its roof. Fabulous. He often shops there. But probably not for much longer. Our rivers and canals are getting a bit crowded. Now that there’s barely an affordable shack to live in on land, people are taking to the water, run by the Canal and River Trust. Worse luck.
CaRT is tightening things up. Costs are rising and at some moorings you can now only stay for seven days, which is tricky for a bookshop, and after three years of cruising, the owners were struggling, so they asked if they could stay permanently in the Paddington Basin. CaRT invited them to hand in a bid and proposal for a trading mooring. They’d be up against other small businesses, thought Jon Privett, co-owner of Word on the Water. Wrong. Guess who won? Another gigantic corporation – British Land, “Creating places people prefer”, owners of 32.8 million sq ft and £12bn of property, including most of the Paddington Central development. They plan to have a floating coffee shop. To go with the other 13 coffee shops in the area.
Fielding is enraged. “I don’t want more sodding coffee. I want books. Yet again, something I like is being taken away. Is there no bloody legal apparatus to deal with this sort of thing? A man selling books on a boat, people love it, along comes a mega-rich toad …”
No wonder Privett is worried that the culture of capital is going to ruin our capital of culture. At this rate, all the charming, unusual, modest little enterprises, along with any slightly scruffy or vulnerable “liveaboards” anywhere, will be soon snuffed out by giants. CaRT has “the power to seize and destroy boats that are people’s homes without payment of compensation,” said the National Bargee Travellers’ Association in 2011.
“We have to be fair on everybody,” is what Privett says CaRT said to him. Is that what they call it? Fair? I’m just off to bang my head against the wall.
