A Canal Minstrel

Boater-musician Tom Kitching is soon to tour his new album. Laura Davis finds out about his inspiration: the UK’s distinct canal communities and living aboard a historic boat

Listening to fiddle player Tom Kitching’s tune ‘Churn’ is like an out-of-body experience. As the first few notes repeat themselves over and over, you are sucked upwards into the sky to look down, crow-like, on the heaving London waterways. As the music speeds up, so does the film in your head – a great swirl of boats constantly coming and going as time whizzes by. More boats than you can count, trapped in a fortnightly cycle of moving on to the next temporary stopping place where they huddle up, double moored.

Historic narrowboat Spey

The capital is where Tom spent six months, swapping boating in his free time for a life aboard an 84-year-old wooden oil tanker, and chronicling it in a travel book and accompanying album which he is touring to around 20 UK venues in 2025. A group of 14 people (himself included) own and care for Spey, a 72ft-long, 7ft-wide narrowboat built by Fellows, Morton & Clayton in Uxbridge for the fuel oil trade between Ellesmere Port and Birmingham. Now Manchester-based, it is close to its original design – with the addition of bunks in the front tank and USB charging sockets. There’s a coal range for heat and cooking. For his adventure, Tom rigged up some solar panels and accepted that, at 6ft 2ft, he would have to learn to sleep diagonally.

Tom set out along the old cargo routes towards London with a goal in mind: to better understand the two distinct communities that travel the waterways.

Tom, 41, says: “The communities that live on the water are very, very separate to the communities that go boating at the weekend or have been involved in the restoration of the waterways.

“There are lots of very good books about the history of the waterways. There are lots of pieces about contemporary communities. But there was nothing to band them together and set what is going on with these new waterways communities in some sort of historical context.

“It seemed to me that using the boat, which is itself a historic artefact and very personal to me, was a key to combining those two stories and say what is going on now.”

This is an extract of the article that appears in Waterways World March 2025

Dates for Tom Hitching’s Where There’s Brass tour can be found on his website: tomkitching.co.uk