A Question of Class?

Starting fieldwork on the waterways was complex, not least of all because many of my early conversations in 2012 focussed on how different boaters were from one another. As one early interviewee put it, there's ‘no one such thing as a boater’. I was told by the same participant that ‘there's a lot of different types of people that live on the boats’ and also, by more than one individual, that ‘the only thing that boaters have in common is that they live on boats’. It seemed that boaters were constantly telling me that there were ‘two types of boater’, or three, or four. As I shall show, class background came up frequently as way in which boating is made up of conflicting ‘types’. Maybe this shouldn't be surprising when we think about how important class is in the UK anyway outside of the waterways and how often people in the UK think about relationships through a class filter. After fieldwork, but whilst I was still living aboard, colleagues, supervisors and reviewers, knowing how important class is to the anthropological understanding of the UK, would ask frequently about the class system on the waterways. The relative lack of sociological and anthropological literature around boaters means that there is not very much literature on what ‘kinds’ of people boaters are. Such literature that there is tends to focus on the quality of the experience of boating and how boaters live, travel and engage with their environments (see Pitt 2018; Malkogeorgou 2019; Roberts 2019). I was, however, immediately interested during my fieldwork in how the people that I spoke to tried to divide the boaters up into different ‘types’ and ‘groups’, which was an extremely common tendency and impossible for me to ignore.

An early push towards my splitting of boaters into class categories was suggested by a boater himself during an interview. My interviewee suggested that there were three types of boaters: ‘snobby day boaters’, who are recognisable by their fibreglass vessels and are unpopular with those who live on the waterways; ‘part-time boaters, holiday boaters and renters’; and lastly ‘us, continuous cruisers, liveaboards’. Much like the ‘weekend warriors’ who are seen as taking part in vanlife communities only part-time (Šulskutė 2014), these partial outsiders are not well respected as being ‘proper’ insiders. Another drew a distinction between ‘two sets of people: those who live on the river and those who are part of the leisure industry’.

I later heard this difference articulated as being the difference between ‘shiny boaters’, or ‘brass polishers’, and ‘dirty boaters’. The former refers to those boat owners (usually, but not always, there are not people who live aboard their boats or, if they are, dwellers in luxury marinas) who are characterised as holidaying aboard neatly maintained boats rather than living upon the waterways; the latter refers to boaters who live aboard all year and can usually be identified by their scruffier boats, with a number of rusting items on their roofs. However, it became clear that this way not just a distinction between ‘holidayers’ and those that live permanently aboard. Boater participants would say that some who live aboard and permanently travel could still be ‘shiny boaters’, ‘snobby’ (implying aloof and out of touch) or ‘brass polishers’. They were, however, clearly not doing boating ‘right’ in the eyes of many of my interlocutors.

Immediately when I began writing about these distinctions, academics and friends alike began to assume that these reflected a difference in class background. Many times, I was asked if the ‘shiny boaters’ were from middle-class backgrounds and the ‘dirty boaters’ from working-class backgrounds. However, those who were easy to identify as having a particular class background did not fit simply into the proposed pattern. Some ‘dirty boaters’ appeared to be, from accents and the stories they told about themselves, from working-class backgrounds, but some were clearly not; most ‘shiny boaters’ were clearly wealthy (as one would have to be afford a boat simply for pleasure), but not all were obviously middle or upper class. Still, so many colleagues had been so emphatic that I must be looking at the manifestation of class distinctions that I continued to investigate the idea. Steve Haywood (2009, 2015), a popular author who writes about the waterways, and claims to have inverted the dirty/shiny boater distinction, was unequivocal when I spoke to him: ‘The divide between these two types of boaters, shiny boaters and dirty boaters or whatever you want to call them, can be characterised by one word: class’.²

Supporting and reinforcing this narrow focus on what was essentially a class-based distinction, it was suggested to me early on in my research that my own class identity³ would form a barrier to my entry into the field and stop me from being able to form close relationships with other boaters. Before I even entered the field, a boater named Paul was warning me that ‘they’ (liveaboard boaters) ‘won't take to you mate, you're far too posh!’ Later, he added ‘Maybe you should turn up carrying a couple of bags of coal, you know, just smear coal dust on your face. Actually, on second thoughts, they'll know you're not proper from the way you carry the [coal] bags’.

Fortunately, Paul's predictions proved to be not entirely true, and I was quickly accepted and befriended at my first moorings on the River Thames. However, a similar idea came up, early in my fieldwork, during an interview with the former New Age Traveller and Brentford-based boater Sim. Sim had ended our (until then quite pleasant) interview by stating that, to get more contacts in the boating world, ‘You have to get your fingers dirty, that's what I'm saying’. As I stood up to shake his hand, he held me in a crushing grip, stared at me for longer than was comfortable and said quietly, ‘Soft hands, you don't work much. No coal dust under your nails’. My posh and privileged upbringing was clearly in evidence from my hands, my face and indeed – as Bourdieu (1977) would describe – my entire habitus or way of being in the world.

It quickly became evident, however, that in reality the fissures on the waterways were not simply to do with class. Voices that contradicted the narrative expressed above were commonplace. One boater, Danny, was quick to note that the idea that there were class differences at play on the waterways was, to him, ridiculous:

That's the brilliant thing innit? It doesn't matter who you are on a boat, you still have to empty your own shit [from your chemical toilet]. If David Cameron⁴ were on a boat, he'd have to empty out his own shit. [Laughing] If ol’ Davey was stuck struggling trying to go through a lock, I'd help him out, I really would, because we're all the same out here.

He later insisted that social background was not a problem on the waterways because ‘it's a great leveller, you don't have much chance for airs and graces if you're up to your elbow in your bilge’.⁵

As an added complication, it seemed that as I continued my research, the liveaboard community itself was undergoing another split, a split that was also potentially occurring along lines that looked to be related to class. Increasingly it seemed that newer boaters, who were moving onto the waterways in popular East End areas, were being accused of not being ‘the right sort’ of boater, of getting into boating ‘for economic reasons’ or ‘because it's cheap’. Experienced boaters frequently suggested that these people aren't becoming boaters for the correct ‘lifestyle reasons’ and instead represent an ‘overspill from a housing crisis’. These boaters are referred to and categorised variously as ‘hipsters’,⁶ ‘yuppies’⁷ or just ‘newbies’, depending on their outward appearances and the appearance of their boats. Again, it would be possible to categorise this phenomenon as a kind of class conflict, with newer boaters representing a more affluent influx into a predominately working-class corpus of boaters. This is not, however, simply a matter of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ boaters as the ‘old timers’ understand it; they were often quick to point out that the ‘type of person’ who was becoming a boater was different, that they weren't motivated by the ‘right’ values (they were more interested in it being cheap than it being a life of radical difference and mobility) and that they were from backgrounds that were too sheltered to be ‘real’ boaters. It is notable, however, that these categories are fluid. Boaters, for example, are often said to be able to move aboard for financial reasons and then ‘learn to love it’. It became clear, in other words, whatever one's background, lots of boaters think that you can become a proper or acceptable boater, yet, the old timers stressed, the ‘new sort’ will struggle.

If boaters were not split by class, then what lay at the root of these intra-community differences, these accusations that newcomers were not ‘proper’ or ‘responsible’ boaters and that ‘shiny’ boaters were something else entirely? Was there an easier way to understand these differences than by referring to class? The search for such an answer led me to an understanding of how a community can be formed through the mechanism of individual's engagement with their environments (or ‘taskscape’) and with others as part of a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991).

For Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), a community of practice is a community that emerges around a set of people, whose shared tasks and goals (where particular skills are required) lead to communities where particular values and ways of doing things are seen as desirable. Being a skilful performer within the community of practice is a kind of status, or even embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu 1977), and learners who are not skilled are often given a status where they can imperfectly engage and learn (called legitimate peripheral participation). The community needn't be fully harmonious; the important part of the theory that I borrow is that it describes how particular skills and know-how can become things of value, and this can, in turn, create a kind of community. The route towards such an understanding began, first, with a re-approximation of my first days aboard.

Learning to Be Skilled

When I moved aboard my narrowboat, Druscilla, in September 2012, I was immediately offered a great deal of advice and support from those living around me. My first week was made busy and social by constant comings and goings as my neighbouring boaters came over to introduce themselves and examine my boat and make suggestions. Simon quickly arrived to ‘check out’ my alternator and to change the belt to one better fitted and better able to charge the batteries. Jo turned up with water-cleaning tablets for my water tank, and Shaun arrived to ‘have a poke’ around my engine. Most notably, however, Tim moored alongside me on his small river cruiser and had offered to help me ajec-32-2.zip find and fit new (low power usage) LED lights. I was expecting Tim, having suggested the project and found all the equipment, to fit the LEDs for me but, rather, he demonstrated slowly how to remove a strip light, cut wires, attach them to ‘chocolate blocks’, test the current, fit a switch and hang the LED strip. I was then unceremoniously told ‘do the next one yourself’, and he watched carefully whilst I repeated the process, successfully fitting my own lights. The next week I paid Tim to paint my roof. This turned out to involve me sanding my roof under Tim's guidance, as he taught me how to smooth chipped paintwork away in fine concentric circles until the paintwork was ‘stripped back’ to the original steel, and then painting the roof after Tim had completed a layer of undercoat to demonstrate the rolling technique.

A clear ethic of DIY and mutual aid was being inculcated, much as such values come to be important in other itinerant communities, such as with vanlifers in Portugal and Germany (Šulskutė 2014) and other communities that Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn (2016) describe as ‘exiles’ living at the ‘the edges of capitalism’ such as Cossacks and Zapatistas. Other more settled alternative communities also value DIY and mutual aid, for example DIY musicians in the United States (Verbuč 2022), those living in American communes in Bennett Berger's (2003) classic study of communal living and mutual aid from the 1960s, and even members of ‘digital countercultures’ (Lingel 2017) who share skills and as a way of inculcating community in online spaces. Simon Springer (2020) suggests that mutual aid is the basis of sociality and that it has been rediscovered since the Covid-19 pandemic. Kevin Wehr (2012) links modern quests for DIY, self-reliance and communities that will support one to support oneself with a rejection of alienation in late-stage capitalism, making it unsurprising that ‘alternative’ communities use such ethics and values. Originally, I had been upset that I had had paid for work that I then had to do for myself, but I quickly realised that Tim, in line with the ethic of DIY and mutual aid that drives many alternative and itinerant communities, was actually giving me the skills to help myself.

My interactions with Tim were not, however, all harmonious or straightforward. One day, when we were discussing my boat and the improvement work that would be necessary, Tim asked me, ‘Do you have any tools?’ I had a few screwdrivers and essentials, I told him. ‘No’, he answered, ‘proper tools, power tools’. I didn't have any, I explained, but to placate him, as he now seemed quite angry, I told him that I would buy some and asked him to tell me what I should buy. ‘No, no, don't buy tools if you can't use them!’ he replied. ‘OK’, I said, confused, ‘I won't buy any tools’. ‘No, get tools; you need some proper tools!’ Tim replied. The argument was a perfect circle. Tim's ambivalence was clear; as a boater I clearly should have tools, but it would be a sham if I had them but didn't have the skills to use them. He was unsure himself as to what to recommend for someone so seemingly unsuited to the skilled performance of boating as I. It was clear from this exchange that the possession of tools and a proficiency in their usage was expected of me, yet I was stuck without either, not quite yet able to fit in to Tim's model of what a boater should be.

As intimated above, the day-to-day running of a boat, and the daily practice of being a boater on the waterways, involves competence in and mastery of a great number of small tasks, and engagement through a boat which is itself an important sort of participant in the waterways. I have already written about changing lights, painting roofs and changing alternator belts. One must add to this emptying out one's chemical toilet or pump-out, lighting a fire in the stove or tying a line onto a mooring pin or bollard when the boat is stationary. When navigating aboard a boat, you must learn to feel the flow of the current around the propeller and rudder when driving, educate yourself to the sound and smell of the engine in order to diagnose when there is a mechanical problem, work out how to stop the boat and tie up at the bankside and become proficient in operating the often archaic lock-gear and paddles with at locks. These are the ‘tasks’, many of which defy codification and must be felt through the active body, which make up the boaters’ ‘taskscape’ (Ingold 2000: 154). These activities are not merely ‘things that boaters do’; rather, I shall argue, the doing of these things are the constitutive acts which transform a person into both a boater and a member of the boating community.

These tasks are not mastered by individuals from instructional textbooks. Rather, their mastery is learnt from others in the social setting of the waterways and through doing (there being very no real difference between doing and learning), in what Ingold calls a ‘system . . . of apprenticeship’, which is ‘constituted by the relationships between more and less experienced practitioners in hands-on contexts of activity’. He continues to say that ‘the fine-tuning of perception and action that is going on here is better understood as a process of enskilment than as one of enculturation’(2000: 37). Ultimately, a boater is someone who learns to dwell upon the waterways, as can be seen in their daily interactions. Learning to be a boater, in other words, is a process of learning how to engage with the series of constitutive tasks that allow you to live and thrive aboard a boat. In Ingold's formulation, ‘the particular kinds of tasks you do depend on who you are, and in a sense the performance of certain tasks makes you the person who you are’ (325). I discuss how these tasks also make and maintain a ‘community of practice’ next.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation within a Community of Practice

The focus on and the careful development of skilled practice within the boating community described above shows a clear relationship to Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). This theory states that learners develop their skills in environments, whereby they enter a community of practice at its periphery and, through a gradual gaining of skills through close attention to other, more knowledgeable members and to the materiality of their environment, gradually move towards the centre of the community, a centre populated by skilled and experienced full practitioners, who are, if not officially ‘leaders’, at the very least respected and important figures. The theory was further elaborated in Communities of Practice, where Wenger argues that these communities are not homogenous or lacking in tension, nor do learners always move directly and smoothly from periphery to centre. Rather, communities of practice are filled with individuals at varying stages of their engagement who may hold radically different understandings of the tasks of the community. Wenger notes that generational tensions are particularly common in communities of practice, as ‘new-comers’ and ‘old-timers’ clash in their understandings (1998: 99–101, 156–158). Despite these tensions, the shared understandings and experiences engendered by membership to the community of practice create a sense of shared life and collective identity (145–163). My own early days on the river, when skills and advice were freely offered and Tim ‘showed me the ropes’ delineated my position as a ‘newcomer’ at the periphery of a community of practice.

Such a relationship may not sound like a classic ‘apprenticeship’, but ethnographies of apprenticeship situations, such as Trevor Marchand's (2001) study of minaret builders in Yemen, show how some apprentices do not learn through direct instruction by a ‘master’ practitioner. Rather, people learn through a fine-tuning of attention, trial and error and direct perceptual engagement with the qualities of the materials, how to produce ‘better’ objects. In Yeman, with Marchand, this is through watching, experimenting and getting to the point where the minaret ‘fills the eye’. Boaters have similar tactics of watching, experimenting and getting things wrong but also have YouTube videos, blogs and a resource of Facebook groups to consult for help. Similarly, Nicolas Argenti uses the notion of LPP in his account of carvers in Oku, Cameroon. He describes how officially sanctioned apprenticeship is not necessary in order to learn to carve in Oku, and how communities of tool-sharing young carvers can learn all the requisite skills ‘by watching others around them as they carve their own objects, but not being instructed in any intentional way’ (2008: 509).

Similarly, the social world of the boaters on the waterways is, as I have suggested, a world where the gaining of requisite skills and the completion of vital tasks is aided and structured by the presence of others, and where a degree of skilled self-sufficiency is vital to one being able to call oneself a boater. It is also important to note that, of course, boaters aren't just boaters, with one set of skills or one way of doing things. Wenger's concept of the ‘nexus of multimembership’ (1998: 159) reminds us that people are members of different practicing communities simultaneously. People who live on boats often have their own worlds of work with skill that are different from their boating skills (although many boaters do work as boat mechanics, solar panel fitters, boat plumbers, boat safety scheme examiners or other waterway jobs).

There is also not one completely homogenous set of tasks that all boaters do (and certainly not tasks that all boaters do the same as each other). However, learning to get by on the waterways, especially through the specific skills needed to live competently on your boat – of getting entangled with boat, community and environment – is a powerful and constitutive part of learning to be a boater. I found that six years afloat were a constant learning spiral – a trial-and-error experience of getting to know my boat and the waterways that never really relented. Throughout this, my boat was my constant obsession and companion.

The Boat as Project and Person

The waterways and the community of boaters are accessed, of course, through the medium of one's own boat, much as ‘vanlifers’ and the road-based ‘new travellers’ are people who become part of their communities because of, and through, their vans and RVs (see Hetherington 1999; Šulskutė 2014). Unlike many other social categories (in this case, sometimes referred to as a ‘minority’ or ‘ethnic’ category), being a boater is not a matter of familial inheritance; rather, it is a description of an action, or more accurately a series of actions. Being a boater is something that one does, which then becomes something that one is, challenging a more legalistic and category-bound way of thinking about identity. This resonates with literature that describes identity as arising in the course of the performance of particular constitutive actions and practices (Astuti 1995; Bentley 1987; Butler 1990), although this is of course a privileged position, when for many identity is an imposition by the powerful onto an individual or community.

In relation to this, Ingold (2000: 132–151) notes that the idea that being a member of a particular social category is a matter of inheritance rather than of direct active interaction with an environment is a Western construct, one that would make little sense to many hunter and gatherer groups where what one does in an environment is exactly what constitutes them as a person. Even though it may sound strange to some Western ears, I argue that the category ‘boater’ is created through an individual's engagement with the waterways through the medium of their vessels – vessels which, due to their importance to a boater's identity, become a focus of great attention and symbolic significance, just like the backpacker's rucksack, or the vanlifer's van. Narrowboats, the type of vessels on which most boaters live, are often brightly decorated, with a name clearly emblazoned that makes a ‘statement’ of the boaters’ desires and attitudes – many boats have some kind of variation of ‘escape’ or ‘freedom’ in the names, (see Bowles 2017: 67) – and are very much canvases displaying the boater's personality to the waterways.

Alfred Gell's (1998) Art and Agency develops a theory that art (broadly that which is made) carries the agency of people out into the world, making people act towards the produced thing as if they were acting towards the person (invoking a ‘living presence response’) and making the thing an active and powerful participant in the world. Boats, invested with boaters’ personality and desires, act in this way. They provide people who live aboard with shelter of course, and take up their time, efforts and energy, whilst presenting the world with a consumable vision of the boaters and a set of signals about who they are. I've known people to treat boats very much as human-like participants, including mourning ‘ill’ and ‘dying’ boats, talking to their boats to make sure that they are ‘happy’ when they want then to start in the winter or referring to people by their boat's name.

Many boaters say having a boat that they have fitted out themselves is desirable, as it allows them to feel that they ‘know’ their boat inside and out. Boats, it is often said, are truly individual, they have their own ‘personalities’ and idiosyncrasies, and no boat is the same as another. Az, a relatively new boater living in London, told me that she didn't mind mechanical breakdowns, as it helped her to learn about their boat's ‘personality’ and ‘what she likes and doesn't’. Because of this, learning one's own boat is a particularly personal journey, a journey which can be guided by others but must ultimately take place only between the boater and the boat.Vale, a young boater from Italy who had been living aboard for around a year, said, ‘I live in my boat, but it's not just my home . . . I want it to be a project as well. It's not just a home; I want it to be a creative home’. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘The space where you live is like a mirror of your soul’, she answered. ‘So I don't want to live in a space which is square like a room. I lie on the sofa [in my boat], like a tunnel, like in the belly of a whale, you know? Ever since I was a kid I wanted to live in a different kind of space, so it's not just I live in a boat’. Thus, whilst a boat is an ongoing project, it is more than this; the boat is an avatar boater's self and an active participant in its own right.

In Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry's (2010) understanding of material culture, objects have biographies that are thoroughly entangled with people and are hard to separate from them. This strand of scholarship – building on Arjun Appadurai's (1986) Social Life of Things, which treated objects ‘as if’ they were participants, but stopped short of removing the person/thing description – is a useful way of thinking through Vale's statement. It is a little self-evidence and something of a tautology that a boater isn't a boater without a boat, but it is important to think through how much boating as an alternative lifestyle and as a particular way of being is about boaters, in community with other boaters, engaging with their boats as projects and as spaces of effortful work and knowhow. Boaters with boats and others make up the taskscape of the waterways through a process of learning and enskilment that emerges through engagement – a community that comes alive in the doing.

Questioning ‘Class’

How does such a view of the boating community help us make sense of the apparent class differences described in the beginning this article? Returning to Sim's send-off when he observed to me that I had ‘soft hands’ and clearly didn't ‘work much’, his problem was clearly not with my accent and appearance per se, but rather with the fact that I did not appear to him to be able to contribute to and participate in the community of practice on the waterways. Paul's assertion that ‘they'll know you're not proper from the way you carry the [coal] bags’ suggested that he thought my body would not yet possess the habitus that demonstrated my familiarity and engagement with the act of dwelling on the waterways.

By ‘habitus’, I am referring to Bourdieu's (1977) concept of engrained bodily state. As Ingold describes it, ‘the habitus is not expressed in practice, it rather subsists in it. What Bourdieu has in mind is the kind of practical mastery that we associate with skill’ (2000: 162). In this way, certain skills are forms of ‘embodied cultural capital’ that have status within the ‘field’ of the waterways (Bourdieu 1977). ‘Posh’, in these circumstances, clearly refers to a disengagement from the practicalities of day-to-day tasks and an unwillingness to get oneself dirty in their completion, in the way that people often imagine ‘poshness’ and ‘privilege’ to work. Obviously, people from all kinds of class and other backgrounds can learn to do pretty much anything on the waterways, but it is important to look at the things that Paul and Sim told me seriously, even if they are a sort of classist stereotype, as they reveal how these boaters think that boating should be done and who will therefore be suited to it and who will not.

Such an understanding helps us make sense of the words of Danny, who said that ‘it doesn't matter who you are on a boat, you still have to empty your own shit’, as a summary of the class situation on the waterways. Class background may, of course, affect one's abilities, as learnt from childhood, to complete many of the tasks in the waterways ‘taskscape’ (see e.g. Willis [1977] 2000) on how class background and abilities to do well with some manual tasks, due to the habitus, can be pretty solidly linked) and may affect one's willingness to learn to do things for yourself, but of course it is important not to take these stereotypes too seriously, as they can be harmful. The split between ‘shiny’ and ‘dirty’ boaters is not necessarily a split along class lines, although they reveal class assumptions: it is a split between those who do not engage in the community of practice (those who are not really boaters at all) and those who do.

This is why it is often said of ‘shiny boaters’ that they care too much about the outward appearances of their boats, spend unnecessary money on ‘trad’ (traditional) kit and trapping, ‘throw money at problems’ (by hiring expensive mechanics) and often live in comfortable marinas where they do not have to generate their own electricity or empty their own toilets, or have a comfortable mooring to return to after a trip. They do not participate in the community of mutual aid and support that is so important to the boaters (Bowles 2022) or respect the DIY ethic that is so important to many in the community, and to so many itinerant communities and communities engaged in ‘alternative lifestyles’ and countercultural activities. It is telling that when I asked a boater whom I met on the River Thames who the ‘shiny boaters’ were, he said first, ‘Well, they aren't lock sharers’. His main way of identifying this type of boater was that they do not participate within the community; they want to go through locks on their own and even to moor on their own, far away from other boaters. The sociality and the support of the community of practice is, to ‘dirty boaters’ or ‘liveaboards’ at least, the thing that they use rhetorically to define them and to mark them out against others.

Similarly, the anxiety concerning newer, more affluent boaters coming onto the waterways, particularly in East London, is a concern not necessarily about class but about an emerging skill gap. When many boaters mention their concern about the ‘new’ or ‘newbie’ boaters, it is articulated that these boaters don't know the rules, the etiquette, and they do not have the requisite skills to live aboard. It is often articulated that these boaters ‘won't last their first winter’ (a rite of passage that is said to mark a transition point between being thoroughly new and being partially competent) and that they need to be told ‘the rules’ and offered support, often with the suggestion being that ‘old-timer’ boaters need to be better and more forceful neighbours and to guide them well.

It is important to note that, whilst demonstrating skills and supporting others is important to becoming a boater, there is a gendered dimension in play, whereby it is harder for women boaters to be respected as skilful and to become part of mutual aid, rather than just being ‘helped’ and patronised by men boaters. Where men or women boaters lack mechanical know-how, this can be experienced as embarrassment and can be mocked by some in the community. There is a masculine and sometimes rather exclusionary feel to the community of practice that forms around the waterways in which it is very often hard to women to be taken seriously as participants (Roberts 2019).

Wenger (1998: 99–101) notes that within a community of practice, without causing an irreparable schism, generational differences can often exist, whereby ‘old-timers’ and ‘newcomers’ clash over the community's production of knowledge and the correct ways to do things. The tensions in London represent not a class split within the social world of boaters but rather a split between old and new that can take on the language of class difference as one of its discursive trappings. The problem is, it is suggested, that with London becoming a busier place to moor due to the city's ongoing housing crisis, there are now too many apprentices and not enough masters. As one boater succinctly suggested, when I told him I often moored in east London, ‘London's full of dickheads now, get out whilst you can’. This boater had spent more time on the rivers Lea and Stort in Essex and Hertfordshire, outside of ‘London proper’, due to these changes.

The journey of the ‘apprentice’ boater from periphery to centre is marked by a series of subtle shifts in identity. When the boater moves aboard and is a ‘newbie’ or ‘green’ boater, they tend to be given, as I have described through my own experiences, a degree of leeway to make mistakes, along with high levels of support and advice, both from their immediate neighbours and from the online community, in order to facilitate their entry into the community of practice. Boaters who have done a winter or two, proving that they have the skills and the hardiness to make it through the cold weather, who have gained a degree of proficiency within the ‘taskscape’ of the waterways and who engage with the community in the correct ways, have moved into a state of being a ‘proper’, experienced boater and are more likely to be asked for advice by newcomers. They have proved that they take boating, its skills and its values seriously.

Those at the very centre of the community of practice, however, often move to an even higher status level, particularly if they have been aboard their boats for longer than a decade. Such boaters can be called ‘proper’ boaters or ‘crusty’ boaters, or can even be referred to as pirates. Steve explained to me that a pirate, in the waterways context, is ‘an old crusty boater, you know, a proper boater’. The use of the term pirate, with its associations of lawlessness and freedom, is a quite deliberate sign of respect; if freedom is one of the things towards which boaters aspire (see Bowles 2021), the naming of more experienced boaters as ‘pirates’ shows that they have earned and attained a kind of freedom which allows them to live properly and ‘well’ upon the waterways.

Conclusion

It has been shown that the waterways, which colleagues, boaters themselves, reviewers of my work and waterways writers have all suggested to me are riven by class divisions, are in fact a site of more subtle and less strictly stratified differences in status based upon one's relationship to and position within a community of practice. The community of practice is the site where boaters, who perform a role which is to all intents and purposes an apprenticeship, gain the bodily skills in order to make their homes upon, and fully dwell within, the waterways of London and the South East.

One's identity as a boater is based upon what one does; it is forged in the constitutive acts of engaging, through tasks, with boats and others in the ‘taskscape’ of the waterways. A sense of identity as a boater and a group sense of communal and common practice, including how the group come to value DIY work and mechanical know-how and to maintain ethics of mutual aid and support, also emerge from these formative processes. Engagement with the material world of boats and the waterways makes both the person and, in turn, makes the community. Following this, class is very often just a way of critiquing those who may be stereotyped as less able, or unwilling to, make that engagement, or are seen as holding opposing values, even is that critique is mainly about assumptions and prejudices based on identity and background. Attention to how people in mobile and off-grid communities become skilful and share skills can only help us understand those communities and their formation better, through close attention to the actual processes of what Lave (2019) calls ‘the everyday’ (Lave 2019) of the skilled interplay between people and things.