Book meets the people who call canal home
Two local authors are introducing readers to the canal community through their first book filled with images and interviews.
An Uneasy Paradise: Living on the Waterways is the culmination of eight years of work by Sebastien and Louise.
After a decade of travel in Asia, they were drawn to the canals with the hope of finding living examples of sustainable ways of life.
The couple are both from Bath and since 2012 they have lived on their narrowboat.
Before then, Sebastien had been travelling and photographing Asia, and in 2007, after completing a degree in art history, Louise joined him.
They crossed the Himalayas on foot and lived for months at a time with families in rural villages.
Louise said: “We felt at home in a foreign land, but that land was changing fast. Consumerism and marketed globalisation was spreading and with it were the inevitable side effects: litter, anxiety, debt and depression, to name but a few.
“We were concerned, not only for the fate of Asia but the fate of humanity.
“To understand this we decided it was time to return home. We wanted to explore our own country, to discover whether those who had lived with the benefits and distractions of this way of life the longest were coming up with solutions to overcome the difficulties it had created.”
They moved to the canals on a narrowboat that provided them with both a home and a means of transport, as they travelled around the UK for over a year.
Louise said: “We realised that the most inspiring community we had come across was back where we had started: the boating community on the Kennet and Avon Canal. This open-hearted and open-minded group of people had welcomed us warmly and impressed us with their active engagement with sustainable living, and conscious sense of responsibility towards their social and physical environment.
“Underlying this discovery was an emerging reality that the way of life was under pressure as the Canal & River Trust’s insistence that boaters cover greater and greater distances in a licence year means that the community is becoming disbanded, and what is already a challenging way of life is becoming ever more difficult.
“A heartfelt fear for the future of the community motivated us to produce a book of photographs that we hoped could showcase the beauty and importance of this way of life, so that its fragility could become known to a wider audience, who would be inspired with the compassion, understanding and motivation to help safeguard it into the future.”
Sebastien and Louise’s first book, An Uneasy Paradise: Living on the Waterways, costs £22 and is available at Toppings Bookshop, Amazon and Etsy.