Historic Infrastructure. Fresh possibilities.
Your Canal Boat brings boats and training to people who need them — showing how London’s 18th-century canal network, and the canal boat experience, can address 21st-century challenges.
With local facilitators, teachers, parents, and musicians, we’ve hosted workshops tackling loneliness and isolation, supported pop-up musical events to support London’s threatened grassroots music scene, and helped residents create temporary marketplaces to spark community. We’ve sponsored gatherings where spoken-word poets meet climate researchers to create scientifically informed poetry slams. Our newest programmes use the canal boat experience to teach leadership skills to South Asian youth.
Whatever your interest, whatever challenge your organisation faces — maybe you need a canal boat? There’s magic in boating. Meetings on board can catalyse change. The only question is: What do you want to do with Your Canal Boat?
To explore your ideas, get in touch here…
Where we’ve been, what’s next
Click the map markers to discover Your Canal Boat’s past events, upcoming projects, and canal-side locations with potential for new activity.
Click the map markers to discover Your Canal Boat’s past events, upcoming projects, and canal-side locations with potential for new activity.
Site of past Your Canal Boat CIC community event(s) 
Site of Spring 2024 floating market (Brigadoon/Rendezvous)
Site of high potential for future community events 
Possible future use for community events
What Your Canal Boat makes possible
We invite schools, arts groups, health providers, and community organisations to use the boat as a platform — building skills, creating culture, fostering inclusion, and supporting wellbeing across London’s waterways.
Education & Skills Development
We deliver practical, hands-on boating education—knot-tying, helmsman training, and basic canal life skills—potentially opening pathways to marine plumbing, welding, and electrical trades and life on the water. By partnering with vocational colleges and engaging women and marginalized groups, we foster confidence, job readiness, and lifelong learning directly on London’s waterways.
Arts, Culture & Heritage
Your Canal Boat transforms moorings into floating cultural stages—hosting open mics, public talks, and song circles, revitalising historic canals as civic commons where artists and audiences co-create vibrant spaces for creative expression and shared local identity. By partnering with heritage groups and cultural institutions, we preserve canal history while giving new voices a platform, keeping the waterways alive as living cultural corridors.
Social Inclusion
Our floating gatherings—shared meals, music, and conversation—create safe, welcoming spaces for South Asian, refugee, and other underrepresented communities. By fostering trust and participation, we reduce isolation and spark neighbour-to-neighbour connections. Each pop-up equips residents with the tools to organise future events, embedding long-term community resilience and leadership.
Health & Well-being
Blending nature, movement, and creativity, we offer canal-based mindfulness, yoga, journaling, and music sessions in what are essentially pop-up health and wellbeing marketplaces. Referrals from link workers and GPs help those experiencing stress, loneliness, or chronic health conditions. Partnership with the National Community Boats Association makes our initiatives pilots for national expansion helping the waterways become accessible, restorative corridors for mental and physical wellness.
