Why we’re raising our young family aboard an old Dutch barge

Laura Edwards and her partner, Alex, were both living on narrowboats when they met. Part of a community of so-called “continuous cruisers”, they opted to move around the canal and river system every couple of weeks rather than stay put at a permanent mooring.

“I remember seeing him and I thought, ‘It’s one of those beardy men that live on the canal’,” says Laura, 37, a forensic mental health occupational therapist. The pair began dating and it wasn’t long before they were expecting their first son. They continued living on their separate boats until just after Arthur, now eight, was born.

“It was around the point [in the autumn] where you have to put fires on and I couldn’t be bothered to light two fires in the morning,” says Laura. “So I just gradually moved in.” The continuous cruising community isn’t a large one, but Laura knows of several other couples who’ve paired up in this way.

“You ended up with these little flotillas of friends. And if you fell out with someone, it was really easy, you just didn’t move with them. It was like a kind of house share but everyone had their own properly private space,” Alex recalls. “Having a boat each does wonders for exploring a relationship before nailing it down.”

They sold Laura’s boat and soon outgrew Alex’s. “By that time, we both had sharpened our aesthetic sense of what a boat is,” says Alex, an architect by trade. “We both like the big old coal boats with the engines that go blum blum blum blum.” They bought what Alex recalls fondly as their “forever and ever and ever” narrowboat – or at least that was the idea.

Arthur’s bunk bed is made from pieces of the couple’s former narrowboat Credit: Rii Schroer

“We never make plans, but that was our plan. It was a really wonderful boat,” says Alex. The couple put in a kitchen, moved in and had just about finished doing it up when they found out that Laura was pregnant with twins. They set about boat hunting again, this time focusing their search in the Netherlands. “It had to be a Dutch one because we liked the shape. And Alex wanted a boat that had a bit of history to it,” says Laura.

It also had to be large enough for a family of five, plus cat, yet be small enough to fit “under all the bridges on UK rivers” and on to their mooring (the family gave up cruising when Arthur was 18 months old). Two years and five trips to the Continent later, they finally found what they were looking for, a tjalk barge built in 1924 as an inland water sailing cargo vessel.

Wider than a traditional British narrowboat and set up with a full sailing rig, its flat-bottomed hull means it is still suitable for navigating British waterways. Twins Ernest and Stanley, still in utero at the beginning of the process, were toddling by the time Alex travelled to Holland one last time in order to sail the barge home across the Channel with some friends. Engine trouble and bad weather put paid to that plan.

“We didn’t intend to do it all ourselves, but it’s hard to get people to do it” Credit: Rii Schroer

“So we sailed home on the ferry and left the boat on a three-day mooring for nearly three months,” he says. Eventually, a skipper was able to bring it over, and the family moved in. “We were pretty shattered by the whole enterprise.” There were moments along the way when the couple considered abandoning life on the water altogether. But ultimately, they couldn’t imagine life away from the boating community. 

“The thing about a boat is, because it’s so small, you spend as much time as possible outside of it. And so you meet people by default. Most of our joint friends are boaters. And they share our ethos and they live near us,” says Alex. The stress didn’t end with getting the barge to the UK. They bought the craft knowing that they would need to make a couple of significant changes to the layout – reducing the size of the bathroom and Arthur’s cabin to allow for a bigger living room and kitchen. They didn’t count on having to rewire and replumb it all too.

The couple were already pretty handy, both of them having replaced heating systems and engines on previous boats. And Alex’s architecture training had developed his eye for detail – a useful skill when it comes to carpentry jobs. But the work required on the barge was on an entirely different scale. “I learned how to be a substandard electrician and a substandard plumber,” says Alex, with a rueful smile. “We didn’t intend to do it all ourselves, but it’s just really hard to get people to do it,” Laura adds.

Serendipity has played a large part in their lives Credit: Rii Schroer

The design process was very different from the way Alex normally works. “When you’re doing your own thing you have a certain freedom, and consequently all of those efficiencies and knowledge go completely out the window,” he explains. “I end up looking really deeply at a piece of wood or a piece of slate and going, ‘What can I do with this?’.” The couple describe their interior decor tastes as “quite ‘boaty’”, according to Alex.

“Lots of brass and lots of birch ply because it’s a great material – it looks quite good without you necessarily having to do much to it.” Aside from the ply, which can be found all over the boat, Laura and Alex have used reclaimed materials where possible to keep costs down and environmental impact low. “A boat being relatively small, offcuts and leftovers are perfect, reducing the need to get new materials made and imported,” says Alex.

The large wood-burning stove in the living room sits on bricks donated by one of Alex’s clients after his house was finished. The copper pipes from which the dining room pendant lamps hang were part of the barge’s old heating system. Arthur’s bunk bed is made from pieces of the couple’s former narrowboat.

Organised storage is key to narrowboat life Credit: Rii Schroer

Serendipity has played a large part too. The squat jars they use to store their dry goods once held peanut butter; the tall ones olives – both such favourites of the kids that they found the jars mounting up around them. The watering can above the stove was one that Alex repurposed in a hurry one day when their self-installed heating system’s header tank sprang a leak.

The pair did treat themselves on a few occasions. The peacock green paint on the living room cupboards is by Little Greene, while the kitchen boasts a sound system from Monitor Audio. The petite kitchen stove, which warms the bedrooms with an unusual mix of smokeless coal and olive stones, came from a specialist yachtfitter called Colin Frake. “We absolutely love it” says Alex. “It’s so beautiful.”

The couple have made the most of the small space Credit: Rii Schroer

Laura took a lead on colours, painting and decorating. “I do the work that doesn’t involve measuring things,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think that’s my strong suit.” But she is “definitely the foreman”, she goes on. “I’m really strict.” Take, for example, the moment just before the first national lockdown back in spring 2020, when Laura, having realised that builders’ merchants would be shutting, sent Alex off to buy the timber for the living room shelves they had long been planning.

“I had that design in my head, so I bought a load of timber, we stacked it all up in the room, and then gradually it became less of a pile and more shelves,” remembers Alex. He’s pleased with how they turned out, but it’s the drawers under the bench that he’s particularly proud of: you can’t tell from the outside, but their innards were shaped to follow the curve of the hull, making the most of all the storage available in this small space. Laura and Alex aren’t finished yet. One day, they’ll build a cabin for the twins, who currently sleep on a futon mattress in Arthur’s room.

And there are still plans to upgrade the kitchen. But for the moment, they’re just delighted with the way the renovations have affected family life. “The children refer to the sitting room as ‘the other room’ because they’ve grown up with only one room. They can be in that room while you’re cooking and they’re not under your feet. It’s just mind-blowing how much that changes things,” says Alex. “And we can have an adult space in the kitchen while they’re there,” Laura goes on. “Having the space was an immediate change in how we related to each other.”