Word on the water

London’s canalboat bookstore finds a berth, and success, writes

Privett aboard the canalboat shop in London.

A canalboat motors along a scenic bend of the Regent’s Canal in London. he had at times been a homeless squatter who supported himself selling used books from street stalls.

A French friend, Stephane Chaudat, provided a boat big enough to be a store, a 1920s-era Dutch barge; he remains their partner.

Privett had a stock of used books. Screech borrowed £2,000 (RM11,013) from his then-sober mother as capital, and their business was born in early 2010.

A few weeks earlier, on Christmas Eve 2009, Borders had closed all of its British stores, and the future of bookstores looked grim everywhere. “I said to Jon, ‘Aren’t we enthusiastically entering a dying medium?’” Screech said. “He said, ‘Well, if all the bookstores close, we’ll still be here.’”

Things went downstream fast. Forced by the berthing laws to move every couple of weeks, they often found themselves on parts of the 14.4 kilometre-long Regent’s Canal with industrial buildings and no customers.

“In the summer, we would make enough to keep going for brief periods, but in the winter it was like a Samuel Beckett play, all blue faces and long coats, barely enough money to get by, borrow from friends, cut down on food,” Screech said. “For years, it just felt like it was going to sink.”

Then it did. A friend used the sea toilet on the book barge and left an inlet open, and the boat sank to the bottom; even their prized copy of was lost. Shortly later, the boat Privett lived on sunk as well, and he lost all his family photographs.

“The two of us were just sitting there on the towpath, crying,” Screech said.

Finally, out of money and short on hope, they reverted to the playbook from Privett’s past, and decided to squat — tying up on the canal at Paddington, near a busy rail station in a neighbourhood being redeveloped rapidly.

“We just parked stubbornly outside the tube station, we squatted there and thought we’d see what happened, and for the next