The Howling Barge

Video-maker and musician Paul Smith is a continuous cruiser on the Lee & Stort whose wide-beam home also serves as a popular recording and performance studio.

Violet Mary is a 'slim' wide-beam.

It was the Rolling Stones who first pioneered the concept of a mobile recording studio in 1968, which was built in the back of a truck by their tour manager and sometimes pianist Ian Stewart. Audio technology has moved on a good deal since the days when the Stones were cutting ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, however, and, as the Howling Barge proves, it’s now possible to have a sophisticated set-up aboard a boat. The Howling Barge is owned by video-maker and musician Paul Smith, who also lives aboard the broad-beam craft, continuously cruising the Lee & Stort. Quite remarkably, both the boating lifestyle and the floating studio concept came to him almost by accident. 

Moving afloat

“I bought the boat around four-and-a-half years ago, during the pandemic,” he recalls. “It was a really tough point in my life. The year before my best friend had died and my life took a bit of a plunge. I was a primary school teacher and kind of walked away from that. I also got divorced and I have two children. I went back to live with my mother in Hertfordshire.”

In spite of knowing almost nothing about boats, one day while walking the towpath of the Lee Navigation, Paul spotted a ‘for sale’ advertisement in a boat’s window. “I phoned the number and it was the brother of the owner, who had just died,” he remembers. “They didn't know what to do with the boat. Eventually, I bought it.”

Paul's hard work has resulted in a stylish and comfortable home.

Paul quickly came to understand that he had acquired a unique craft in Violet Mary. Although a broad-beam boat, it is only 8ft 6in wide. This is because it was built single-handedly by a local welder, Peter Chipperfield, in a lock up that was only fractionally wider. It was his passion project, constructed over four years from pieces of steel, and no one had ever been aboard before Paul came to view it. “So then when I stepped in, it was kind of crazy, like stepping into one man's shadow,” he says.

In terms of its interior, Paul describes it as a “car crash” with rats running around and a solitary mattress on the floor. “I think he'd run out of steam by the time he got to the interior part and just couldn't finish it. So I'd walked into this unfinished thing, which is basically all I could afford anyway, and then I just got renovating. It gave me this new energy. A new belief.”

Paul ascribes his “get stuck in” approach to his father’s influence – a very practical man who builds guitars. This is just as well because the project before him was daunting…

“Everything needed doing, from panelling the walls to putting in a cooker and carrying out all the electrics. Also, I had a big issue with the Beta 43 engine, which didn’t work. I had engineers come and look at it but they didn't know the answer. In the end my dad and I figured it out: Peter had built the diesel tank at the wrong height, which is why it kept spluttering and stopping. We installed this little diesel pump to keep it going.”

Acoustic vessel

Drowned Bells performing live.

While living aboard and refitting the interior, one day Paul idly picked up an acoustic guitar and began playing. It was then that he realised the unique quality of the boat’s acoustics. “I thought, it's absolutely magic in here. As an acoustic vessel, it’s perfect. It has that mixture of wood and glass and soft furnishings and it just has this lovely natural reverb to it.”

Waterways passion

Like many other enterprising people on boats, Paul has attracted the interest of the makers of the Narrow Escapes TV show and, after two years of being filmed, he will appear in the second series, which will be broadcast later this year.

In spite of the many new experiences the Howling Barge project has given him, it is the waterways themselves that Paul credits with turning his life around. “I felt very, very lost and as soon as I got on the Lee, that changed. It’s an oddly grounding thing to be on water – it’s so beautiful and calm and just such a lovely way to live. I don’t think I could ever live back on land.”

This is an extract of a feature that appears in the April 2025 issue of Waterways World, click here to read the full article. 

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