The history of our canal boat holidays With the coronavirus lockdown in place, we can only dream of taking a holiday on the water and plan for when the restrictions are lifted. In this article for Drifters, Debbie Walker takes a look at how leisure boatin
OUR rivers have been used for transport since prehistoric times, but it was the Industrial Revolution that created the need to move large quantities of raw materials, goods and commodities efficiently and resulted in the construction on thousands of miles of canals across England, Wales and Scotland.
The history of inland waterways pleasure boat hiring started in the 1860s when it became fashionable to take boat trips on the Norfolk Broads and the Thames. By the late Victorian era, the Thames had entered what some authors have described as the ‘golden age’ for leisure.
In 1916, shipping agent Peter Bonthron published My Holidays on Inland Waterways, detailing his 2000-mile journey around Britain’s waterways at the beginning of the 20th century.
But it was Tom Rolt’s book Narrow Boat, published in 1944 and describing his 400-mile journey aboard Cressy along the network of canals in the
Midlands, that is said to be ‘the book that saved Britain’s canals’.
Narrow Boat tells the story of how Rolt and his wife fitted out the boat as their home and celebrates the lives of the working boatmen, the canal craft and the timeless countryside they discovered on their travels. The book was an instant success and has since inspired generations of boaters.
Although by the 1950s commercial use of the canals had significantly declined as interest started to grow in using canals for leisure, a number of canal boat hire companies were established. Many of the canal boats available for hire at this time were converted working boats but by the 1960s more narrowboats were being specially constructed for the leisure hire trade.
Since the late 1990s our inland waterways have entered a new ‘golden age’ of leisure use, with more than 200 miles of waterways reopened and more than £1 billion invested in their restoration and upkeep.
There are now more than 35,000 canal boats on our inland waterways, more than at the time of the Industrial Revolution. More than 1000 of these are specially designed and constructed canal boat holiday hire boats with modern conveniences – hot water, central heating, flushing toilets, well-equipped kitchens with cookers, fridges, microwave ovens, TVs, DVD players and many now have Wi-Fi too.
There are also a number of hotel boat operators offering skippered and fully catered canal holidays.