WORD ON THE WATER
Nicola Lisle discovers the story of London book barge Word on the Water, now in its tenth year.
AS YOU gaze down on the boats on the Regent’s Canal near Granary Square, there’s one that stands out. It’s the one with ‘Bookshop’ emblazoned across the outside, and you’ll probably hear music playing and see the boat’s resident dog, Star, wandering around hoping for treats. New and second-hand books adorn the outside of the boat, and there are more crammed into every nook and cranny in the cosy interior.
This is Word on the Water, London’s only floating bookshop and a tiny oasis of calm amid the hubbub of the city. In its 10 years of existence, the bookshop has become popular with locals and tourists, and as I sit on the towpath chatting to Paddy Screech, one of the partners and founders of the enterprise, we are interrupted several times by people not only buying books but wanting to chat as well. Word on the Water, it seems, has become a social hub, where people are happy to browse and pass the time of day.
Things haven’t always been so rosy, though. The early years of Word on the Water were fraught with problems, and it says a lot for the tenacity of Paddy and his business partner, Jonathan Privett, that the bookshop is still afloat – in both senses of the word. So, what prompted them to start the business?
“Well, we’re all boaters,” Paddy says. “Our boats were in Springfield Park, a lovely bit of London. So, we had a conversation about whether it would be possible to be bargees – i.e. make our living on the canal as well as living on the canal, and how we might go about it.
“I’ve got a degree from Oxford in English, and Jon has a post-graduate American Studies degree, so between the two of us we thought we’d be quite good at curating a shop.”
The discovery of a 100-year-old Dutch barge, in excellent condition, started the ball rolling. After negotiations with the owner, Frenchman Stephane Chaudat – who became a third partner – the bookshop opened to the public for the first time in 2011.
After a promising start, though, things quickly went downhill. Business dried up during the winter, and on top of that there were two disasters – the book barge flooded, with the loss of most of their stock, and Privett’s own boat sank after sustaining damage while going through a lock.
“We had this Samuel Beckettlike winter, where from this glorious optimism of the summer we were now hideously depressed,” recalls Paddy.
“Then very slowly we started to move around London, and found the very few places where the bookshop and the canal seemed to work well, but we could only stay in them for very brief periods of time. If the weather was right and the place was right, we did quite well. If either of those things were wrong, we did nothing. That went on for about six years, and we just scraped and staggered along. We almost didn’t make any money at all, and I had to ask my mother to lend me money. It was all a bit tight.”
Permanent mooring problem
The lack of a permanent mooring was a huge problem. “We kept nearly giving up because it was an awful lot of work,” Screech says. “We had to literally unbuild the shop every 14 days, drive to another place overnight and rebuild it at 4 o’clock in the morning and open the next day because we didn’t want to lose any day’s trading. It started to get very pressured because of the increased population on the boats, and we got to a stage where we couldn’t get into the towpath to trade when we’d get to a place.”
After bombarding the Canal & River
Trust with requests for a permanent mooring, Paddy and Jon were eventually invited to tender for one of several moorings being made available at Paddington, but this came to nothing when the moorings were all allotted to a local real estate corporation. Defiantly, they “just squatted” at Paddington, as Paddy puts it, and took their chances, prompting a series of threatening letters from the Canal & River Trust. Then, in true 21st century style, everything changed when Paddy posted a copy of one of these letters online and suddenly their situation went viral.
“We had about 30,000 followers online, and I hadn’t really thought through the implications,” admits Paddy. “People started to email [the Canal and River Trust] and someone started a petition. It ended up in Private Eye and The Guardian and on BBC TV, and American newspapers started covering the story.
“Finally, the Canal & River Trust contacted us for a meeting.”
That meeting was followed by another seven months of silence, by which time Paddy and Jon had virtually given up hope. Then they got the call that changed their lies – an invitation from the Canal & River Trust to meet them at Granary Square, which at the time was still in the process of being redeveloped.
“Apparently, all the personnel had changed at the Canal & River Trust, and all the people we’d been having these grindingly difficult relationships with had been replaced by these friendly, bouncy, helpful young men who thought we’d been treated appallingly and asked what we wanted. So we said, we’d like to be here, please! And they did everything to make that happen. So we ended up getting the mooring here. That was three years ago.”
Initially, money was still tight, so Paddy and Jon crowdfunded so that they could pay the first few months’ mooring charges. Since then, things have been steadily improving, with plenty of footfall from Granary Square, now a vast public space with shops and restaurants, and the nearby King’s Cross station. In addition, the coverage in American newspapers has resulted in an influx of American visitors who are fascinated by the shop and help to sustain it during the winter.
Lack of space compared to a normal bookshop means that Paddy and Jon have to be selective about their stock.
Chance to slow down
“We’re about a twentieth the size of a normal bookshop, so we have to hit the most sought-after things and also be quirky enough to stay interesting. We don’t want to sell exactly the same things you see in Waterstones.
“I’m keen on curating quite tightly and carefully, and we’re keen to be a literary bookshop as well. We’re not very good at true crime and diet books. There’s a sort of peripheral range of things that we just don’t go in for at all.”
Being situated near a major international station is an ideal location and an exciting challenge. “If we’re going to be right next to one of the biggest international stations in Britain, we should do our best to deliver. A lot of people arrive at the station and it’s the first time they’ve ever been to Britain. And we might be the first thing they see in Britain, so we don’t want to disappoint those people.
“We’ve improved the shop and gentrified it as we’ve gone along. As soon as we stopped moving, we stopped having to break it and rebuild it every 14 days, so we were able to grow a bit.”
From the start, the bookshop has featured music and poetry events, and it was original owner Stephane – also known as Noye – who had the idea of putting a stage on the top of the boat.
“In the summer we have some sort of live band every day when it’s sunny,” says Paddy. “Jazz, world music, folk music – things that don’t argue with a canal towpath. It’s quite a subtle art to do live music that doesn’t drive people mad. It’s meant to be very peaceful.”
For Paddy, the fact that the bookshop lies in a calm, rural oasis close to central London is one of its most appealing qualities.
“It’s a bit of country plonked in the middle of Zone 1, a chance for Londoners to slow down,” he says. “It’s a bit manic up there in the rest of the city. I love the way in London the canal’s down, so you’re sort of under London rather than in London.
“It’s a little bit of representing the boating community as well, being a sort of outward facing example of the culture of the canal. It gives a clear indication that we’re not to be feared!”
As for the future, Paddy just hopes to continue to survive. “The plan is to keep doing this until we die, which I never thought would be possible. We’re looking at doing pop-ups and growing the business a little bit that way. But the plan’s just to try and be here forever.
“We’ve finally discovered a way to make it work, and work fairly consistently, so we’re just so delighted. Also, the Canal & River Trust have bent over backwards to support us since we arrived in our permanent mooring, and we are enormously grateful for that.”