Now that the canals are becoming a living force again, for pleasure boating rather than transport, maybe we will see a revival of appreciation and practice of this art. The glorious decorations are an expression of pride for a very particular community whose way of life changed surprisingly little in just under 200 years.

Here is wonderful description from “On The Canal” by John Hollingshead, in Household Words, September 1858:

 

“The boatman lavishes all his taste; all his rude, uncultivated love for the fine arts, upon the external and internal ornaments of his floating home. His chosen colours are red, yellow and blue; all so bright that, when newly laid on and appearing under the rays of the mid-day sun they are too much for the unprotected eye of the unaccustomed stranger. The two sides of the cabin, seen from the bank, and the towing-path, present a couple of landscapes, in which there is a lake, a castle, a sailing-boat, and a range of mountains, painted after the style of the great teaboard [tea tray] school of art.”

 

The origins

As the competition between the canals and the railways became more intense, the narrowboat workers had to find ways to make ends meet amid the price-cutting wars. One solution was to bring along their wives or girlfriends as crew and make the boats their permanent and only home. The women were considerably more house-proud than their menfolk had been and the colourful decoration of the interior of the cabins was one way in which they tried to make their spartan living conditions more pleasurable. Also, the confined space of the narrowboat (10ft by 6ft) meant that only a very few possessions could be accommodated, so each individual item gained great importance. What better way to boost your bowls, stools or water cans than by painting them?

The colourful exteriors of the boats helped to cheer up the rather dour industrial areas where the narrowboat families came together; and as the idea of painting took hold in the tightly knit community, it evolved its own peculiar rules and styles, unique to the narrowboats and unique to England.

Types of decoration

There are, broadly speaking, three ways to decorate the outside of your narrowboat, in addition to keeping your brass work gleaming and fancy rope work scrubbed and trim:

 

• Firstly, you can use ornamental lettering to spell out the name of your boat, the owner, the registration number, place of abode and possibly a motto (such as “Good luck”) or an advertisement. While most of this information is legally required to be clearly displayed, every opportunity is taken to make the signs beautiful in their own right and add finishing touches of scroll work or garlands of roses.

 

• The second kind of decoration is to use blocks of colour (red, blue, yellow, green, black and white) and abstract patterns, including stripes and diamond shapes. Different parts of the boat - such as the fore end, mast, rudder, stern and cabin roof, back and sides - have different conventions governing decoration. Throughout, light colours against dark is the formula, maintaining harmony across the boat even with such strong colours.

 

• The third kind of painting is much more pictorial and nobody can really trace its origins. Known as “Roses and Castles”, it is considered very un-English due to its rather blousy, romantic and overdone style – although the stylised rose designs may have developed from the commonly found dog rose, the castles rarely look anything like what you would find in England, with red tiled roofs and cone shaped turrets. LTC Rolt (in his book Narrow Boat) describes watching a series of castle panels being painted in a Banbury dockyard in 1944: “He blended together the green, the blue and sepia until a typical scene, dear to generations of canal folk, suddenly took shape under his hand. Here it would be a castle with a single battlement turret, rising against a background of rolling blue hills and red sunset; there a more monastic structure, twin towered, and backed by woods, a stream flowing improbably through an arch in the base of one tower and spreading into a lake in the foreground.”

 

Inside, similar conventions of painting will be used but the effect is all the more overwhelming because you are in such a confined space. Every surface, every cupboard door and drawer can be painted. Traditionally, white crochet lace would be hung from every ledge and surface too.

 

Whilst the different canal networks did breed slightly different kinds of decoration and the work of individual painters can be distinguished, narrowboat painting is a uniquely coherent tradition which celebrates the English canals and the people who live and work there.