When you’ve got somewhere so beautiful, you want everybody to know. But what tends to happen when everybody knows, it becomes overrun, overused, and it wears out very quickly. Because we’re a hidden gem, we do get new customers every week, which is nice to share. We are very, very lucky. It’s the best office window in the world.

It’s a real hidden gem. We still have people who live in the local area that don’t know it’s here.

We’re cocooned into a different world here. A boater’s life is a very different life to somebody who lives in a house. Everything’s very, very slow. If it went any slower, we’d probably go backwards. It is a really nice way to live if you don’t have a full-time pressure job, if you don’t have three children, two dogs, a cat and a fish. A lot of these boaters are either single or young couples or somebody who has lived a life and wants to slow down a bit, so they’ve retired. It’s a very, very slow, peaceful life. Definitely tranquil.

Samantha Walsh and myself, we’re a couple and we own the cafe and the marina. We provide the gas, the coal, the diesel, and a pump house. But we also provide a sense of belonging and community. This coffee shop. It’s a real hub. You get lots and lots of people come down just because they want to get out and come down and speak to somebody.

We’re sitting in a boat that me and my daughter and boyfriend, and sometimes my husband, are doing up. This boat is something that my daughter and boyfriend are planning to live on. When they bought the narrow boat, which is only about 6 foot wide and 40 foot long, pretty much everything wasn’t functioning properly. The ceiling was made of plastic, the fireplace was in the wrong place, there wasn’t a bathroom.

So we have just spent this last year renovating it, putting in electrics, putting in a bathroom.

They made the decision because they started looking at renting somewhere, and they realised that what they would get for what they could afford was something that they just didn’t want to live in. Renting somewhere, you can’t make decisions about what it should look like, but it’s just been really nice to be able to make all those decisions about their home, and it’s been a great joy to work with them to make it a reality.

We are on the Apperley Bridge Marina in Greengates. I would call it a suburb but I suppose they call it a village, of Bradford. Between Leeds and Shipley. Skipton’s about a three-day trip on the boat for me. Up the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

I live and work on the boat. I work on the internet, and I have different jobs online, different hours each day. It’s flexible. I move slowly, but I’m a digital nomad, and it’s a second half-of-life choice. I sold my house in America, and bought a narrow boat in England. I’d raised my kids, they’re all over there. I like that I got rid of most of my possessions to move on to a little narrowboat. That’s kind of freeing. I like the idea that I can take off, start my engine and go, if I have the whim to do so. The people you meet along the way are almost always nice and helpful.

I bought the boat in Nottingham, I didn’t plan to be here. I’d never even heard of Bradford, and was just coasting along here, and came to this marina and needed to go to the shop. So we pulled over, and then COVID hit. They had a spot available, and I’ve been here ever since. I think part of that’s because I’ve built a community here. In Greengates I have a church, I have friends, and there’s two pubs that I’m comfortable in. It’ll be harder to leave if I leave, but yeah, staying here was never the plan.

The good thing is, if I want to go anywhere, I start up and off I trot. Go for a sail. That’s the good thing about it, that you’re actually taking your home with you. It’s nice to be in the marina as well, especially in winter, because you’ve got hook-up electric.

I’ve done quite a bit of sailing. I’ve done the full Leeds-Liverpool. I’ve sailed from here to London, and back. I’ve also sailed the Lancaster Canal. But Leeds-Liverpool is a lovely place to be. I’ve been on here going on six years now. Yeah, everybody gets along to be fair. It’s just a lovely community where we live. We’re handy from here because we’ve got all the shopping centres just up the road. We’ve got the train station just across that park. The top of the hill, we’ve got the airport. So on the one hand you can take the slow route on the water, or you can go on the train if you want to go faster. And if you want to go faster still, you get the plane!