To those in the UK. Do you ever see narrow boaters? edit. pic of boat

I'm fascinated with this right now. Never heard of it till last night. My wife is friends with a lady via a knitting board and this lady and her husband lived in this boat and is constantly moving through the water channels in the UK.
Is that a common thing?
She said some people call them river gypsies.

So their boat is only 7 feet wide and I think 20 or so feet long. The move through the channels and sometimes they have to manually crank this elevator thing to get up night to the next channel. She calls it working the lox.
Seems so strange. She has pics I will post when I get home.

They seem like super awesome people too. They were both engineers and they quit and started a company called river knit. They knit # to sell at shows and their main thing is dying yarn. They due blue faced leischter and hand it off the side of their boat to dry. It is beautiful stuff.

She plays according and he plays violin.

Anyway they seem awesome but wondering about the lifestyle in general.
Is it popular there?

Equal to living in a motor home I guess but on a narrow channel

a reply to: TinySickTears

I really want to show pics but I can't from phone.
If you Google
Riverknitsuk their stuff comes up. Instagram with really cool pics of the boat and channels.
Of course yarn too.

I can't stop thinking about them and how they're doing it on their terms.
Not like they are on the boat cause they are poor.
They keep a flat as they call it for supplies and finished goods but live and work on that narrow boat.

Living life on their terms

I've never met them but they're my favorite people right now

Loads in the river medway near me. There is even a lock in Maidstone thats still in use.

Kierra Knightly the actress even has one or at least had one a while ago.


You can get them rather cheap too or at least cheap when compared ro a normal house.


And if you go up to Norfolk there are even more than down near me.

a reply to: TinySickTears

Yeah you see them moored up along canals all the time, the boats are called barges in the UK.

A lot of people rent them for holidays.

a reply to: MagnaCarta2015

Seems so wild.
I googled it and saw you can rent them.
Living on it just seems so strange to me.
Some of those channels are so narrow.
They have a pic of their boat inside a channel and there is a wall on each side about a foot out from boat. So like a 7 foot wide boat in a 10 foot channel.
Crazy

And she is nasty at the according too. They seem so cool

originally posted by: MagnaCarta2015
a reply to: TinySickTears

Yeah you see them moored up along canals all the time, the boats are called barges in the UK.

A lot of people rent them for holidays.

My family used to hire them out in Norfolk for family holidays when a child.

Was great as even at 8 they would let me drive the boat !

a reply to: TinySickTears

Ive slept on a boat on a lake before...thats some serious deep sleeping if you dont get sea sick easy!

Barges my dear...

My family had one yonks ago back in the 70s and we are not Gippos...

Just enjoyed the canals...

Warmest

Lags

a reply to: TinySickTears

Yeah. I know two people who live on narrow boats. It is a bit like living on the road but on water. They still have to pay mooring fees etc but I'm not sure about the rules. I think if you're constantly on the move you can swing it but the guys I know stay fairly static.
There used to be a lot more in my approximate area because when there was a thriving pottery industry it was a good way to move the wares because on the water there's no bumps in the road to crack the plates and stuff.

The modern boats can be nice inside like a camper van with as many mod cons as you can fit but my mates prefer wood burning stoves for heating and bottled gas for cooking. With modern moorings you can hook up electric and there's taps so you can fill your water tanks. Some regular mooring spots and marinas have shower blocks but generally speaking its a sort of traveller lifestyle.

To be honest I should know more but it doesn't come into conversation much unless they're moaning about repairs or fuel costs, its just their house. One of them works at a boatyard so he's always fixing them up and lives pretty much on site. The other one has a living boat and a more rough n ready barge as a trailer/storage type set up.

Many years ago I think there was a little bit of mistrust about some if them, a bit like travellers today but there seemed to be a distinct difference between the narrow boats which were purely mobile homes and those whose profession was to transport stuff. The pros were known as "bargees" because the transporters were called a barge.

If you've heard of a comedian called Tony Hancock, he was in a film called The Bargee which might be worth a look but I can't guarantee it to be a very realistic portrayal of the lifestyle.
I once had a weeks holiday with a friend years ago in my teens. The boat was only small but you still had to wind up the crank with a key to get the big heavy lock gates open. A pain in hilly terrain but not so bad along the flats.

When I was growing up we lived about a mile from the canal so regularly went for walks along the towpaths or swimming in summer. An old tractor tyre inner tube makes a cool floating donut when fully inflated too. You rarely ever see horses towing these days, they're mostly diesel engined.
There's a long tunnel up the road and they'd place a plank across the top and two people lay on their backs, heads inwards and "walk" your boat through the tunnel with your feet on the tunnel walls. Hard work!

That's about it really. I could go on but I won't bore you. Cheaper than buying a house but size restrictions and not extravagantly luxuriant but still in use today.

What? it's just a house-boat, probably a pontoon, (not a 'barge' lol). This is pretty common throughout the US. The Tennessee river has quite a few "locks" you have to go through to get above dams.

House boat is my default fallback plan, If sht gets bad, I'm just gonna sell my house, most of my possessions, build a custom house boat from a 24' pontoon and fish and forget the world... not sure why I'm waitin on sht to get bad now that I think about it.

originally posted by: Lagomorphe
Barges my dear...

My family had one yonks ago back in the 70s and we are not Gippos...

Just enjoyed the canals...

Warmest

Lags

She jokes about being a river gypsy cause they are usually on the move. I guess in winter they stay put

a reply to: Tulpa

Not bored. I'm fascinated with this right now.
Get boat has solar panels on top.

I'm pretty fascinated with how they're living their life. I mean 2 engineers can certainly afford a decent flat and cars but they choose to do this. Just cruising around coloring yarn and knitting. Playing music.
Sounds awesome

a reply to: rexsblues

Her boat just don't look like the kind of boat I would call a houseboat.
Long, narrow, and not tall.

My grandad used to have one.

He'd take us on trips down Norfolk Broads.

Was lovely. Also where I got my first scar as a child. Good times man.


They're pretty popular in London as well where I live by the River Thames.

a reply to: TinySickTears

I think that might be what we call 'deck boats'. A lot of people live out of small house boats like that in the south around the inner coastals and swamps. A fine, simple and fun way to live my opinion.

a reply to: rexsblues

i took a pic of screen with my phone

a reply to: TinySickTears

Something I thought was cool that you might be into is group of people called boat punks.

Since a few years now, there is a distinctive fourth group of seafaring people. These are young kids in their twenties and thirties with left-wing progressive views, disenchanted with the capitalist system, and the middle class standards in the United States of America, seeking alternative ways of off-grid living, self sufficiency, and ultimate freedom.

Recently, owning and maintain a boat has become more affordable than ever thanks to the development of new cheaper technologies, the access to on-line information about how to build and repair a boat, and to the global economic collapse. Boat prices have dropped dramatically.

Thus, young rebellious kids can now get an older used boat for as little as a few hundred dollars and fix it up on a very low budget using all sorts of recycled materials, even junk, and go exploring the world.

www.thelifenomadik.com...

Here's a message board filled with boat punks and all kinds of other weird travelers..
squattheplanet.com...

Boat punks build or rebuild their own boats and just sail around the world, from the U.S. to South Africa, SE Asia, and all points in between with meetups in certain places a couple of times a year. I've always been interested in the subcultures that are out there that no one really knows about.

a reply to: TinySickTears

ha! cool! yeah that's alittle different than what we got. That things way over 20ft long, 30ft at least. Damn, i'd hate havin to turn that thing around, even in open water, thing looks like it get sunk in 4ft swells. Definitely new to me. lol still pretty sweet though.

a reply to: TinySickTears

They really are narrow. I like the solar array on top.

Around here barges were still in use till the 1990's for actual work as pottery was fragile and transport between factories via road normally meant a good bit of breakage so getting it out of tight terraced streets was easier via boat.

If you keep moving every 2 weeks you don't need to pay council tax but due to it becoming popular again the mooring fee's are going up so staying at some places could be rather expensive.