  My
old fashioned concept of a houseboat is a boat that is used as a house -
a dwelling, somewhere to live. But it is a boat first, primarily a piece
of water transport, however long retired and however far it has been
dragged from the water. Because proper boats have to obey boating laws to
float and travel safely, those same laws impose certain conditions on its
appearance. To float it has to sit in equilibrium with a low enough centre
of gravity that it won’t roll over; it will have a hydrodynamic shape of
some sort, probably developed from generations of slow tradition so that
it travels through the water efficiently. Thus it is usually longer one
way than the other and pointed at one end. In other words boats look like
boats, whether big or small. Until recently their shape expressed their
function in a time honoured and commonly recognised way.
 My memory of houseboats in my youth - and this
could be strongly rose-tinted with nostalgia - is that they were
definitely boats first and houseboats second, and that whatever was done
to them to make them better living accommodation was done within, or close
to, the aesthetic boundaries of boatiness. They respected their history
and heritage. Cabins that were so big as to look un-seaworthy were simply
unacceptable to the inner nautical susceptibilities of the houseboat
dweller and didn’t happen. The fact that it had once been a boat seemed to
unconsciously impose a set of visual constraints on the owner, whether
land-lubber or nautical romantic. Was this true, or is it how I wish it
had been?
 It is certainly not generally true in
Shoreham nowadays. There are many interesting craft on the moorings, but
the interest is sometimes difficult to see. As Philip Simons dryly remarks
in his book Retired on the River about one particular continental
trading ketch “a major rebuild as a luxury houseboat has made her
almost unrecognisable, though one can say this for a lot of the houseboats
at Shoreham which seem to have been entered in a shed building
competition.” In one extraordinary case an old Portsmouth steam ferry
has been entirely re-created into a massive collaged sculpture, an artwork
quite divorced from its history or environment, but this is a quite
definite artistic statement and is certainly not typical of the majority.
Most are just a hotch-potch of cabin extensions in whatever materials come
to hand, quite regardless of any marine tradition.
On the canals things are generally less
extreme although as the number of live-aboard boats increases the number
of tatty insults to the canal tradition also rises. When most of the craft
that were permanently lived on were carrying boats, the traditional
standards or conventions of the boating population were pretty rigorously
observed, for fear of ridicule from your boating neighbours. Frightening
standards of cleanliness and polish were the everyday norm, standards that
are now usually only seen at a boat rally on a nice day in the summer. But
even then the gleam was subservient to a sense of tidiness, of order, of
everything in its place ready for use. If it wasn’t practical or
functional it was put away out of sight or it simply had no place on a
working boat anyway. The practical constraints of living within the
confines of a boat cabin imposed constraints on the amount of clutter that
could be collected. That was the nature of the deal - like boating, accept
the constraints. |
|
 I just wish that the people that choose to
live on canal boats today would accept that whole package. Wouldn’t it be
nice if there was some sort of understood contract here, a balanced
agreement? If you are going to live on a small boat you have to be
prepared to adjust and live within that small space with all that that
entails - very few belongings in a confined space. If you need to spread
your goods and chattels all over the roof and the towpath you’ve either
chosen the wrong size boat, or the wrong lifestyle. If you want to live on
the canal without spoiling it then be prepared to live within the canal
conventions. Then your boat stands a chance of remaining a structure of
functional beauty, an ornament to its rightful environment instead of an
eyesore for everybody else that has to look at it, changing and spoiling
the canal heritage that survived until the coming of the pleasure boat in
huge numbers. |
