Little more than six months ago, Paul and Anthony Smith-Storey were still living in a three-bedroom semi-detached house near St Helens in Merseyside. But now the couple – and their dog, Dexter – have traded it all in for a life afloat in a two-metre-wide narrowboat on Peak Forest Canal in Derbyshire.
“We took the equity out of the house, bought the boat and thought we’d enjoy it while we were still alive,” said Anthony, 48, an NHS sonographer. They are not the only ones.
Record numbers are spending time on Britain’s rivers and canals, according to the Canal and River Trust. Such is their popularity that the charity, which manages 2,000 miles of waterways across England and Wales, says: “There are more boats on our canals now than at the height of the industrial revolution.”
In March, there were 35,130 people with boat licences for rivers and canals – compared with 34,435 last year and 32,490 in 2012. Trust surveys put the proportion of “liveaboard” at around 25% (a rise from 15% in 2011) nationally, and it believes the majority of boats in London are permanent…
