Pretty Boats
Yesterday I saw a cormorant on the canal bank, which was handsome. but one permanent feature that makes the Grand Union Canal such an attractive part of our neighbourhood is the number of boats that you see, and that number has increased enormously in the past ten years. The big change came before the Olympics, when boats were turned out of the River Lea and the Bow Back Rivers in order to create a security zone around the Olympic Park; a lot of those boats came round the Regent's Canal and ended up around our way. There are a few permanent moorings round here, on Blomfield Road and Maida Avenue (and beyond Lisson Grove), but those are virtually all full. The great majority of boats here have people living on them permanently, but are moored in temporary berths. That means that they are supposed to move on every fortnight or so, which some do, but many do not. I conducted a wedding for a couple who live on a boat a couple of years ago, and we discovered that they were able to fulfil the residence qualification for banns by being moored on my stretch of canalside for the fifteen days in which the banns were called; I know that they move backwards and forwards on the canal between Paddington Basin and Southall. Others, observably, do not move very often. There is clearly an infrastructure problem here, because I'm not at all sure that the hygiene station by the entrance to the Pool can really cop with the demands on it now. I have no idea what people pay for permanent moorings, which have proper facilities, but clearly it suits some boat-dwellers not to bother with that, but to remain nomadic. They like the freedom, and they like it not costing too much, which is fair enough, but facilities are an issue (in our neck of the woods it is as simple as rubbish, great piles of which sometimes appear on the Green or the towpath).
Losing the Stakeholders
Now the Canal and River Trust seems to have fallen out with boat dwellers. The CRT was set up in 2012 as an independent charity to manage the assets of the former, publicly-owned British Waterways. The history is that the canals were built as private enterprises and mostly bought up by railway companies in the nineteenth century (with some idea of an integrated freight network), and so when the railways were nationalised after the second world war, the canals came too (along with a fair amount of housing in our area). Obviously British Waterways was an ideological affront to contemporary economic wisdom, but the successor body, CRT, was set adrift with not much capacity to raise the money it needs to maintain and run the canal network. It was an unusual privatisation, as CRT is a charity, but that's clearly because no-one could get the business model to be attractive enough for investors to put money in. CRT tried initially to raise income by issuing licences for people to cycle on towpaths, but that has been quietly abandoned, as they had no resources to police this system, and it implied that cyclists could expect safe, well-surfaced towpaths, which CRT was in no position to deliver. Now, they are looking to make money from selling public moorings off to private investors. Here in Paddington the plan is to sell 140ft of public moorings, directly outside the station entrance, to British Land, who will seek commercial tenants for them. British Land is the huge property developer who is responsible for the Paddington Basin development, having acquired all that formerly publicly-owned land long before CRT was created. Canal dwellers are unsurprisingly suspicious of British Land, whose stewardship of what appears to be public space is of course completely unaccountable. Meanwhile, over in east London CRT wants to sell off a whole batch of public moorings near Broadway Market as part of a regeneration scheme.
Cosying up to Shareholders
You can understand CRT's desire to raise some money to try to do the job that the government saddled it with, but it is clearly perverse to reduce the number of public moorings in central London when it is plain that the demand for them is growing hugely. Of course, the reason demand is growing is that canal boats offer an affordable form of housing (if you can bear the cramped conditions) which is increasingly being used by young professionals. That, of course, is just a symptom of London's deep housing crisis, but we know that the present government has no intention at all of doing anything to tackle it, because they actually believe that the overseas investment which has so overheated the market is a good thing.
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