Roving Traders — canal boat owners licensed to sell goods and services on UK canals — have to be mad.  Consider the challenge of living sideways in an improbably elongate tube.  Now consider shoehorning a business in there with you.  And if you somehow defeat the odds, and are hard working and fortunate enough that your product finds an audience ... your continuous cruising license requires that every two weeks you leave your customers behind.  

For a business reliant on good weather (in a country famous for not having it) there are yet more obstacles: like the law, and a licensing organisation who should, but rarely does, protect you.  

Consider Sam Keay, owner of Gangplank Spirits, whose loyal customers chase her around the countryside, bringing wild-gathered fruits in season to swap and flavour her gins and cordials. For years Sam says she was welcome wherever she went. With the pandemic and challenging times, however, she finds herself increasingly confronting licensing officials — five times this year — demanding she have a local street traders license, obliging her to cease doing business and move on down the Cut.

It’s unpleasantly reminiscent of how authorities have traditionally responded to people on the edge of town whose lifestyle threatens their own.  It also appears to be in contravention of law.  The Pedlars Act of 1881 decreed that one authority’s permission to trade be respected nationwide.  Reciprocity — it was understood — is necessary to  preserve the peddling tradition, a profession as old as almost any, and iconic in British history.  

Which explained Sam’s anger when both the Canal and River Trust, who issued her the license, and the Roving Canal Traders Association of which she is a member, declined to rise to her defence.

A CRT official obliquely threatened they could simply do away with the Roving Traders license should her demands persist. The Roving Canal Traders Association, which purports to represent her, declined to enter the fray, afraid that complaining would only make the situation worse.  

Nevil Ingram, a Small Business Advisor at City of Bristol College, however, was spoiling for a fight.  A Roving Trader himself (his business is “The Big Cheese”), Neil helped launch a successful “Justice for Roving Traders” Crowdfunder campaign.  With £2000 they paid an attorney to craft a legal opinion for roving traders to present next time they are challenged by local licensing officials.

But legal arguments don’t help roving traders crack the London market where the sheer popularity of canal boats is precisely what excludes them.  With upwards of 3,000 boats in London — and seemingly all of them wanting to moor on the 10-mile stretch between Little Venice and Hackney — a roving trader doesn’t stand a chance.  Few even try.  

Lindsey and Jeremy Morel, owners of the Floating Boulangerie, are the exception that proves the rule.  Based in Kings Cross during lockdown, customers queued for two hours to buy their bread.  Their calendar was crammed with £20 breakfast reservations.  They were the picture of a successful enterprise, with  thousands of followers on Instagram and testimonials from people who’d cycle 30 km to buy a croissant.  Film students made videos about them.  But lockdown ended and CRT demanded they relocate far from Central London. 

A month later I found them on Acton Road, dejected, miles from the adoring customers who only months before had them investigating rental of a kitchen to meet excess demand.  

Jeremy was throwing away stale croissants.  “It’s just too much” Lindsay explained.  “Between Brexit increasing the cost of our supplies, and CRT putting us on a restricted license, we’re going back to France.”

Indeed, their boat and business are now for sale.  But who is mad enough to buy it?  If a trained chef and baker with savvy businesswoman wife, a sensational product and thousands of customers can’t succeed on London’s most popular canals, who can?

A whole bunch of them perhaps, organized as a perpetual floating market, planned sufficiently in advance for the Canal and River Trust to reserve them moorings across London.

That’s the essence of Brigadoon!, which launches this week. Inspired by the mythical Scottish Highland village which magically appears every 100 years, this Brigadoon — with music, theatre, workshops and roving traders — will appear every two weeks along the canal.  

From October 22 until November 4, a small flotilla of roving traders will pitch up under the Westway overpass in Ladbroke Grove.  A boat with stage for performance, a Dutch barge whose captain leads historical walking tours, a seafood boat and a pizza boat, along with vendors from Portobello Road selling merchandise in time for Christmas, are the core around which this market is organized.  

Organizers’ ambitions are more than commercial, however. By creating a locus of activity in a historically problematic location they focus attention on its unexploited potential.  The Westway overpass — whose construction famously obliterated much of the North Kensington neighbourhood it transects — protects almost 100m of canal from the rain.   It is the one weather-proof canalside location in London that can host outdoor events, something post-Covid London needs now more than ever, and which a neighbourhood with the storied musical history of North Kensington can exploit more than most.

Before the market relocates closer to Paddington Station for its next two-week manifestation, interested parties will convene to create a Friends group to take ownership of the site, plan its future, and start organizing future events — with and without boats — that reflect the needs and resources of the community who will own events there going forward.

Sounds mad, but perhaps the only thing mad about it is that no one’s ever done it before.

***

Your Canal Boat CIC, the official organizers of Brigadoon, are working with the Canal and River Trust to plan a year’s worth of stops across London.  Discussions allow for the growth of the market to include as many as 20 boats.  Roving traders who want to be involved are invited to contact Your Canal Boat CIC Director ericellman@gmail.com.

My partner and I moved onto our narrowboat one dark evening in late winter. Cocooned in the warmth of a tiny cabin, we awoke to find our new life upon us, serenaded in by an astonishingly loud dawn chorus. 

We peeked out into the marina, a couple of shy newbie curtain-twitchers, intrigued by the orderly rows of narrowboats impossibly sandwiched in side-by-side. It was a strange new world to us and one which we and our boat were shortly due to leave, now the formalities of the sale were complete.

But how to operate this awesome beast? We are both dreamers; we get excited, jump first and think later. Sometimes we land on our feet and sometimes we land on our backsides. Which was this to be?

Step One: to find and buy the boat. Thoroughly researched and now done.

Step Two: the next bit… This had been largely ignored, beyond the wistful fantasies provoked by glossy narrowboating magazines. Now it seemed incredible, irresponsible (downright dangerous, even) that we were allowed to control 20 tonnes of motorised steel with zero experience and no brakes. As if sensing my growing panic, a kindly nearby boater called Ken volunteered to accompany us on our maiden voyage. Ken, if by chance you are reading this, know that I have since blown you many kisses of thanks!

Freshly armed with a few hours of intense tuition from guardian angel Ken, we started the engine and untied our new home. We slowly manoeuvred this ginormous 57ft long creation out of the marina, painfully aware that we were surrounded by watchful eyes and expensive boats, with little room for error. The Gods smiled down upon us and we made it to the canal without incident.

And so our journey through ever-changing landscapes began. The world abruptly slowed down. The sun gently rose and fell, followed by the moon. A rhythm all of their own to light this watery wonderland with two suns, two moons, one still, one dancing.

There were the odd moments of horror amid our newfound bliss. I can still picture the frantically shaking head and wild hand gestures of the poor man inside his boat as we attempted to moor for the first time. All three of us realised during those last painfully slow seconds that we were about to clout hard and fast into his pride and joy. He had the good grace to laugh once I’d babbled my apology and told me at least his whisky hadn’t been knocked flying, or we really would have been in trouble.

Winter drifted into spring, each day holding the promise of a new adventure. We too drifted with the seasons, never knowing what was waiting to be discovered around the next bend. We passed crumbling mills, factories and huge old pottery kilns, still fighting to show themselves above the crazy tangle of brambles clawing their way up like a scene straight out of Sleeping Beauty. These relics were from a frenetic age I had heard of way back in the dull, lethargic classrooms of my childhood where I'd only half-listen, daydream and wait for the bell. Now they were up close and real in glorious technicolour. So many abandoned monuments built and occupied by people who are long since gone. We were wide-eyed and curious, imagining what once was, listening hard and watching for ghosts.

And then out into worlds free of humans and their paraphernalia. Two tiny spellbound spectators perched on the back of a now seemingly tiny boat, drifting through vast, outstretched landscapes, full and rich and empty of anything not created by Mother Nature herself. We would moor up and proudly survey our enormous garden, sometimes so far from new provisions we would have to rummage deep into our supplies and concoct bizarre dishes from what we found lurking there.

Summer was glorious. Deep in ancient woodlands the reflections became so still and vivid it was utterly disorientating and impossible to tell where foliage ended and water began. A thousand shades of green, sprinkled with the vibrant jewels of wildflowers. I would wander free as a bird to plunder these gems, my hoard of multi-coloured treasure carried gleefully back in warm, sun-kissed arms. We were never alone, no matter how far-flung; the slow-motion rise of a heron, the glimpse of a water vole, the startling blue flash of a kingfisher, geese honking overhead, bats swooping at dusk. We delighted in spying them all.

The silent descent of the first few leaves, carried on freshly stirring winds, warned us the spell of summer was starting to break. Soon the air was thick with them and the towpaths buried deep in blankets of gold. Replacing sandals with boots, I would kick my way joyously through, marvelling at their abundance. All the world seemed golden then; the skies, the trees, the flames flickering in the newly lit evening stove.

And so we came full circle, back into winter. The palette changed to silvers, blues and greys. The holidaymakers and fair-weather boaters were long since gone, the canals fell ever more deserted and desolate and belonged to us. Our boat became a retreat; a warm, softly-lit and friendly refuge from the fierce forces of nature doing battle outside her trusty steel walls. We let them fight, tucked up and content, safe in the knowledge that spring would emerge victorious all in good time.

For Anne and Jack Day, who designed, adventured upon and loved this beautiful boat before us.