Fifty five years ago, construction of the Westway forced relocation of hundreds of North Kensington families, earning it a place in history as one of London’s Most Notorious Highways. Today it’s a cautionary tale for Planners and Engineers in how NOT to build public infrastructure … and also how to mitigate its impacts.

Skateboard parks, exercise facilities, shops and offices were eventually added to Westway undercrofts, integrating the highway into neighbourhoods along its length.

Except for a bit that swerves over the canal near Westbourne Park, which stayed notorious, and lately has gotten worse. Burnt, sunken vessels — relics of a remarkable conflagration a year and a half go — still block mooring on one side of the overpass. On the other side a patch of rubbish and construction debris swells and shrinks depending on how recently CRT has evicted the
responsible entity.

How does this cycle end? How does the community take possession of a unique public place? The only rainproof stretch of canal in all of London? Allowing it to fulfill its promise as a weatherproof showcase for commerce and performance? Something London needs more than ever in the post-Covid age?

With the 300+ mixed unit Taxi House development rising within view of the blight, Cheyne Capital has a stake in it, but no clear obligation; their primary obligation is to shareholders and tenants. The Canal and River Trust is obliged to maintain their towpath, but lacks enforcement power and funding. Borough government is the only one with the financial means to address the problem. It is their residents, after all, who benefit most from a beautiful towpath; and their residents who suffer from its absence.

So the City of Westminster must be applauded for developing London’s latest borough-wide strategy to improve the canal in service to constituents.

The ambitious plan, launched after Labour took over for the first time in borough history, details three ongoing projects and seven future ones. The Flyover is listed as high priority.

With borough funding, Your Canal Boat is getting a jump start. Beginning Sunday Feb 23, we present 30 free workshops at the site to demonstrate a different vision for the space, and to grow support for its use as a point of outreach addressing the NHS's new priority, an epidemic of loneliness and isolation estimated to account for 20% GP office visits.

Sessions run the gamut, from drama therapy and teaching your toddler to make music, to journalling, crocheting, mindfulness and cooking. Gerard Williams, the Running Mayor of RBKC, leads running and walking sessions every morning that use our host boat, “Bibo”, as bag drop and refreshment station.

The full program can be viewed here: One of London's most notorious highways

Our partners are “social prescription” advocates Golborne Medical Centre, who believe that doctors should dispense more than pills, including recommendations for time on the water. That’s consistent with something that boaters learned long ago, that the canal boat experience is its own tonic.

Dr. Yasmin Razak leads a lunchtime discussion on the 25th of February on the topic of the canal as a tool for social prescription. A second lunch forum on the 26th features Dr. Greg Cowan, architect, boater and lecturer at University of Westminster, giving a boater’s history of the Westway. Imperial College’s Luke Muscutt moderates a panel of architects dissecting various proposals for the Westway’s future.

Attendance for both discussions is free, but limited to 10. Write to admin@yourcanalboat.com if you’d like to be part of either one.

Your Canal Boat, a Community Interest Company whose mission is to activate underutilised canal side spaces, is organising a floating market with up to 8 boats to trade pop-up style, continuously, for two months across West London this Spring.

With CRT appproval of our final schedule pending, we anticipate space for five more traders beginning with our first market at Uxbridge 1 May.

Boats currently subscribed include 'Molly Anna', our main entertainment and broadcast centre, 'Shorewaters', serving delicious traditional Indian dishes and 'Winnimax', a state of the art recording studio offering demo recordings for performing artists.

With additional providers of food and services, we aim to create a festival-like atmosphere that generates new interest in overlooked locations, culminating in stakeholder engagement sessions that encourage residents to effectively “own” and manage them going forward.

If that sounds like your kind of “trouble”, organisers invite you to get on board.

Plans
The flotilla will rendezvous for the first week of May in Uxbridge before travelling to the Hanwell Hootie - UK´s biggest free music festival, where Molly Anna serves as the official ¨busking boat¨. The ‘’village’ then spends three weeks at two Brentford locations, before travelling back up the Hanwell Flight to the Hayes Festival where they will end two months of trading at Alperton.

What happens thereafter depends on public response and the collective decision of participants.

Jeet Bahal is one of the flotilla´s pioneers, a 70-year old marine engineer who has circumnavigated the globe 7 times, he passionately believes that a canal boat village is as appropriate for London as those he marvelled at in Thailand and Cambodia. Jeet brings his boat Shorewaters, his curry recipes, and deep connections with West London’s Sikh community to help achieve it as a reality.

But what should we call this experiment in perpetual canal boat festivity? A canal boat village that pops up, casts a magical spell and disappears again?
Jeet opined for the name “Brigadoon,” a nod to the Broadway play about a mythical Scottish Highland Village that materializes every 100 years. What better analogy for a floating ‘village’ that relocates, popping up from week to week along the canal?
Brigadoon suggests marvel, mystery and a fleeting presence. In Hollywood’s 1954 version, Gene Kelly is an American who stumbles into Brigadoon and falls in love.
- Does he stay with the woman he loves or should he return to his lived reality of a ‘real world’ in New York?

And will this canal boat village be similarly enchanting? Will people follow along to wherever it moves in accordance with continuous cruising requirements?

Woody Travis Walker believes they will. Woody, a classically trained actor, has sailed on tall ships and run music sessions on the Golden Hinde. He looks forward to hosting a podcast that promotes the project with music, theatre & interviews, or as he describes it, “the poetry of the waterways”.

With the help of the Punjabi Theatre Academy that poetry will likely include a South Asian accent. Recognised as the first thespians to bring the story of the Southall riots to the stage, the Punjabi Theatre Academy will utilise Brigadoon as a platform to solicit immigrant memories of the renovation of Heathrow Airport, from a wartime facility into London´s principal terminal.

Families are encouraged to bring their elders to be interviewed and photographed at public engagement sessions in Uxbridge, Hayes, Hanwell, Brentford, Southall and Alperton. Collected content will be transformed into a Bollywood style production for the following Year 2 village flotilla.

Sir Tony Robinson, England´s most beloved popular historian, has contributed a video encouraging people to get involved and bring the program into the heart of London.

To be a hit in the The Big Smoke, the village needs a coffee service and beverages, and services from massage to haircut to tattoo, are invited to consider joining.

Write admin@yourcanalBoat.com to learn more..

The smooth underbelly of the Westway Highway swings wide over the Grand Union Canal at Westbourne Park, creating a ceiling for the towpath and ½ a dozen canal boats moored below.

For architect Matt Hopkins, it's a sight to behold whenever he cruises into Paddington on his 70’narrowboat. But the breath-taking infrastructure has a troubled history; its construction in 1971 displaced over 3000 North Kensington families. Resulting controversy helped produce much more extensive neighbourhood engagement ahead of similar developments today.

In the half century since, the City of Westminster has responded to the Westway’s intrusion with a number of measures: A sports complex at Shepherd's Bush. Offices and shops at Portobello Road. But at Westbourne Park — where a football pitch length piece of land could support an all-weather market, musical performance, or whatever else the public wants — time stands still.

Why a place with such potential remains a destination for rough sleepers, scofflaw dog walkers, and occasional boaters refitting their interiors is a question I hoped to answer at a discussion Hopkins recently led featuring architects reviewing old proposals to re-imagine the space.

The discussion was part of a weekend program called "Building Dialogues" ̈the latest in a history of interventions for this persistently challenging spot. Besides an architectural discussion there was music, educational workshops and a visioning exercise for boaters and borough representatives. All to demonstrate the variety of programmes the space lends itself to, and which were last seen there during a month-long 2019 London Festival of Architecture installation.

I had been a participant in that, loaning my boat and its full length stage to the team who contributed the winning entry, the ̈Co-Mooring ̈, which for 30,000 pounds attempted to unite land and water, encouraging more and better interaction between boaters and visitors to the canal. Its lofty ideas collided with reality, however, when cyclists objected to its sinuous boardwalk and local hoodlums asked for money to not burn it down.

With more continuity, these might have been valuable learning experiences, except the final stakeholders ́ discussion atop Molly Anna was interrupted, and — with Covid around the corner — never resumed.

Four years later we reviewed the list of 49 companies who had submitted proposals for the 2019 competition. Architectural firms KMBH, Sisters & Tiger, Merritt Houmoeller and Make:Good all had received £500 to further develop concepts to temporarily transform the space. Though none were ultimately selected, all wanted to publicly review their old plans and discuss what might still happen.

The architects sat on chairs sandwiched between a vendor selling samosa chaat and an upright piano wheeled in for the occasion. They joked about their professional lot...submissions for design competitions that never pay the bills...but to which they repeatedly succumb, stubbornly believing that the right mix of ingredients can turn urban blight into community gold.

Asia Grzybowska from Sisters and Tiger had driven the furthest, 5 hours from Cornwall, to discuss why no such alchemy had happened here. In a sterile space animated by graffiti but not a blade of grass she related the story of a garbage strewn median in Oakland, California, and how a surreptitiously installed ceramic Buddha had sparked a metamorphosis. People brought flowers. It became a shrine. Crime fell by 80%.

With sympathetic City of Westminster leaders showing renewed interest in canalside opportunities, could something similar happen here? Community-led, in lieu of major investment?

What user groups could be induced to adopt this space? What changes would inspire a similar transformation as Vietnamese pilgrims had brought to an unloved highway median in Oakland?

Ladbroke Grove’s musical community could play a role, suggested Ben Crockett and Jezmond Farran, musicians who waited to perform on the event ́s floating stage. Local legends Hawkwind, the first space rock band, had played there in the early 70s, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the place, the only covered — and therefore weatherproof — stretch of canal in London.

Fifty years later, what stymies a design that will transform this space? So that vendors can sell goods, boaters can responsibly dispose of rubbish, cyclists can fix their bikes and no one gets run over?

The chief impediment — the architects concluded — is the site's ́complicated ownership. Each team had had to speculate on what various entities would approve: the Highway Department which owns the overpass, the Canal and River Trust which owns the towpath, Great Western Studios which owns a sliver of land and the City of Westminster which owns the rest.

“The Borough,” Hopkins said on behalf of everyone, “is the only entity that will be here in 300 years. They need to convene the other stakeholders and see what modifications are allowable.”

• Would the highway department allow public artwork and lighting on the underside of the Westway?
• Would property owners allow a storage facility for items needed for pop-up events to encourage further use of the site? tables and chairs? bins and bin bags? work benches for boaters and cyclists to do repairs?
• Would the bus facility allow lowering of the retaining wall and removal of barbed wire as elsewhere along the retaining wall? Opening up views and allowing light to penetrate?
• Would CRT create a bookable mooring(s) for roving traders to sell items and act as caretakers? Could a uniform ground treatment be installed, to reduce conflict between users and allow for greater flexibility of use?

Hopkins cited the Royal Parks for demonstrating how a uniform surface and appropriate signage can induce cyclists to give way to crowds and during events.

With those questions answered architects could produce a final design to heal a historic wound and with it, perhaps, create a new paradigm for local government, CRT and private entities to collaboratively wring utility for canalside locations across London.

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.

London’s live music scene had problems long before covid. Back in 2009, when my then 89-year old Tante Rosie’s health began deteriorating and my trips to London started becoming more frequent, the boom in real estate prices was already impacting the music industry. As flats had gone up, pubs and venues closed down. In 2016, Mayor Boris Johnson commissioned a live music task force to address the problem. 

By 2015, street corners themselves were closing: proliferating Public Space Protection Ordinances (PSPO’s) banned buskers — practitioners of the world’s “second oldest profession” — from the city’s most popular pitches.  Boris Johnson, still Mayor of London, created a Live Music Task Force to address the problem.  The City’s 100-mile canal network did not figure into their proposed solutions.  

Don’t ask me why.  As someone who would eventually sell a house in Texas to keep his new widebeam afloat, I was used to Austin, where even petrol stations and Burger Kings host musicians. But here in London, on the watery arteries that were my new adopted home, all I heard was the chatter of Coots and two-stroke Lister engines.

When the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea banned amplified music on Portobello Road in July 2019, I offered my boat — a widebeam kitted out with full-length stage — to buskers for gigs adjacent to the patio of the Union Tavern in Ladbroke Grove.  The pub didn’t pay.  The customers didn’t tip.  But the musicians came back anyway.  All month long.  For the sheer novelty of playing on Molly Anna.

How do you harness that energy?  How do you put together the world’s largest collection of aspiring performers with discriminating audiences?  In compliance with Canal and River Trust rules that limit you to audiences of 12 and acoustic music?  And post-Covid, how do you do it on a scale that addresses the fact that venues which successfully evaded gentrification remain shuttered?   And will be shuttered again, as a first precaution authorities take when a novel virus next spreads?

Brigadoon! is our answer.  Not the mythical Scottish Highland Village that appears every 100 years, nor the Broadway musical with Gene Kelly who stumbles upon it during a love-struck hunting trip, but a flotilla of canal boats that manifests every two weeks, somewhere along the city’s labyrinth, weaving a magical atmosphere of music, theatre and public discourse, unlocking a new potential for London’s old canals.

It’s a big vision that started small.  

Last September, when Covid concerns were peaking, and the biggest controversy in London was whether to close the pubs an hour early, we debuted the World’s Smallest Canal Boat Festival at tiny Mary Seacole Park in Harlesden.  Between the time of our application — when gatherings of 30 were still allowed — and the date of the event, the limit shrank to 6.   In true show biz fashion, however, the show went on.   Copper Viper, Amy & the Calamities, Bozard and Scratch Theatre performed for... well mostly for themselves, really.  And a dozen onlookers from the Mitre Bridge who’d gathered for a historical tour we'd organized of nearby Kensal Green Cemetery.

It took months to organize an event that few beyond the performers attended, but it proved the concept: The first time you debut performance at a 220-year old canal side location is a pain in the ass.  It’s much easier the second time, when all of the entities: the Canal and River Trust, whichever borough you’re in and the Met Police have seen it before.  

So — although the government hasn’t announced whether they’ll lift the last restrictions on public gatherings on June 21 — we are planning the First Annual Mary Seacole Picnic at Mary Seacole Memorial Park in Harlesden, June 25-27.   Capacity will be limited to 30 people at any time, but fringe activities, including walking and paddling tours of the canal to the adjoining cemeteries, including the graves of the brave and enterprising nurse, will occupy more.  

It’s the first manifestation of Brigadoon!, with a handful of boats, that we expect to grow in number as we roll onto the next event a week later, and one a week after that.  Each one reflecting the character of the neighbourhood.  Each one requiring agreements between local Borough officials, CRT and Met Police.  Each one leaving a template of risk assessments and Covid-precautions for other canal boat owners, roving traders and performers to jump start discussion with with local officials.  Who this time, will already know what you’re trying to do.  

We kick off in West London, where the moorings are plentiful, and where we hope it will be easier to rendezvous with roving traders who we hope to entice down to the city later in the summer.  If we can band together as many as 20 of them, and give CRT a good 4-6 weeks heads up, they’ll put out mooring suspensions in central London to bring the flotilla to the people.

That’s the second major outcome we see from all of this, making London attractive to roving traders again.  If you’re someone who sells goods or services, and think you’d like to join us, you can follow our progress on our website, and we’ll see you on the canal!