Narrowboat hire firms - Grand Union Canal

Narrowboat hire - Grand Union Canal

Hire a boat on the Grand Union Canal and you have a lot of choice of boats, places to go and things to see - as you would expect from the longest canal in the UK! The main line of the Grand Union leaves the River Thames at Brentford and climbs over fifty locks up into the Chiltern hills. It descends then climbs again to a new summit in Birmingham, 137 miles and 166 locks.

• Boatmen used to claim to do London to Birmingham in five days but allow well over a week if you want to get any sleep!
• The canal towns of Braunston and Stoke Bruerne with its Canal Museum are well worth exploring.
• The Leicester Section 66 miles long with 59 locks and 2 tunnels was built as a broad canal but there are flights of narrow locks at Foxton and Watford.
• The River Lee and the River Stort open up some surprisingly fine countryside to Bishops Stortford and Hertford.
• The flight of 21 wide locks at Hatton was built during modernisation in the 1930s with distinctive hydraulic paddle gear which is usually easy to wind but slow to work the paddles.
• Most hire boats are narrowboats. There are increasing numbers of wide beam boats but many are static. There are width restrictions at a number of bridges and wide beam boats must arrange passage through the tunnels to avoid meeting narrowboats coming the other way.