RBOA/BW liveaboards survey

One of the curiosities of Granny Buttons in recent months is the way that one particular post of mine is No. 1 in Google for 'narrowboat for rent'.  Dozens of people are now posting their 'narrowboat wanted to rent' ads as comments on this post.

And not just those who want to rent boats, but those looking for residential moorings. 

Yesterday Sarah asked:

I have just bought a 30ft narrowboat to live on whilst studying, and I am desperately in need of a mooring ... the nearer to Coventry - or public transport to Coventry - the better.

I did have a marina sorted, but then I bought a smaller boat and the marina can only allow me a mooring if I have a bigger boat. 

Any help finding somewhere to moor, long or short term, would be great, as I only have a week until I need to move from London.

Large numbers of people want to live afloat, but often they want to 'try their hand at it' first before committing themselves, and a long waiting list might not be appropriate.  Or, like Sarah, they don't want to continuously cruise.

This week British Waterways and the Residential Boat Owners' Association (RBOA) announced a joint survey to find out what people are looking for in residential moorings.

There's a good reason for asking.  As more people come on the canals, there's not only a shortage of moorings, there's an uncertainty about what people expect from a mooring.  (In Sarah's case, the main issue seems to be public transport, little else.)

In the preamble to the survey BW says:

We hope the results will help us encourage developers, marina operators and planning authorities to provide more residential moorings.

The survey should be on the British Waterways site here, but it's not released until Saturday, and there's currently an error on the BW website.

Because no one is sure what liveaboards expect, the new breed of super-marina tends to be fairly standard about what it offers.  In other words it offers pretty much everything, a highest common factor, something for everyone.   And to support all the facilities, they make the marina itself as large as possible.   The new Mercia Marina, for example, has room for over five hundred boats. 

But there's one feature they still don't offer: Residential status.  Almost all these new basins permit only a very small proportion of liveaboards.

The chief problem is planning permission.  Local authorities are loth to grant residential status, because they fear that in next to no time they'll see a new village where last year stood just an empty field or a converted wharf.

And they fear that the new village will soon be a town, populated with angry (floating) voters, and they'll be demanding extra street lighting, upgraded roads and parking, offices, industrial units, improved security,  electricity sub stations and bigger drains.  And they'll be voting for a Tesco in the next-door village.

A non-residential 'marina' ensures that people will pack off home at night and won't demand a say in the local community.

But so many people now want to live afloat that we need somewhere to put them, other than hogging all the visitor moorings. So BW has got together with RBOA to create the survey, asking people what they expect. 

Perhaps they hope there's enough demand for a new lightweight residential status, where people don't want every type of facility.

This might ease the worries of local planners, who'd be more willing to grant permission for new urban mini-basins or rural canal arms, offering very small communities of light environmental impact - say, 10 - 30 boats. 

These new communities would be offline, so that they aren't clogging up the canals and visitor moorings. 

And they could settle for just a mains water tap and a letter box for a postal address.  They could rely on composting toilets and a small wind generator.  

I'm thinking of one such community - the Old Engine House Arm at the top of the Napton Locks flight on the Oxford Canal (pictured here).   As you go past this little jewel, you'd hardly believe a dozen residential boats were moored here.

But there's one more  feature that I'd say is vital in the 21st century.  Don't laugh: it's Good Telephone Lines.  For boats, I'd install this even before electricity cables.  You can fit out a boat to deliver sufficient power from solar panels and a wind generator, but even wireless broadband will still need a good land phone line somewhere close. 

If I was BW, I'd avoid calling these new mini-communities 'marinas'.  Call them 'basins', or better still, 'arms',  and sell them as mini-canals.

They'd still need a small car park, though.  For every liveaboard boat clogging up visitor moorings, there's usually at least one rusty old car or camper van clogging up a country lane nearby, as I've mentioned before.

See also: It's the car parking, stupid.

Comments

[Martin]

Hi Andrew,
Now I'm all for this 'light-residential arms' idea. It seems to be part of the answer to the residential moorings problem.
Where do we go to push the idea?

[Andrew Denny]

Andrew,
I suspect truly mobile broadband will long be a problem. It is still rurally very patchy, and always slower, and you are limited to how close the mast is - and then to a single service provider. And expensive with bandwidth limitations.

And if you don't like, say, Orange or Three, then tough. Setting up a mast is a major and expensive initiative, whereas once you can get a good landline to a rural spot it's much cheaper and more flexible all around.

Any brand new line is likely to be fibre optic, allowing a very fast line that can be shared by several people/boats at once, at lower cost.

[Andrew Smith]

Actually these days, truly mobile broadband seems to be hitting the mainstream so the landline to provide the wifi hotspot wouldn't be strictly necessary...

[iain smith]

sounds ideal and the way to go obviously.The other type of marina must be a bit akin to living in a housing estate, and what i imagine most people who own a boat want to get away from.