Stay on a narrowboat hotel touring England’s canals

Canal boat hotels are like tiny floating country house hotels - but much cheaper. 

I woke with a start. Where on earth was I? This was clearly no ordinary hotel. As I lay on my bed I could see ducks peering in my window.

I'd slept so well I'd forgotten where I was. Come to think of it, I didn't know where I was anyway. That's because I was sampling a new type of hotel - in a converted narrowboat. We'd moored somewhere in the middle of rural Worcestershire in the dark the night before - miles from the nearest town, village or road. No wonder I'd slept so soundly.

The idea behind a narrowboat hotel is that you may like the scenery, brightly painted boats and romance of the traditional waterways - but don't fancy steering a 15-ton flat-bottomed vessel more than 23 yards long, operating flights of locks and being responsible for all the chores on board.

Stay on a converted canal boat and you will be fed and looked after like a guest in the smartest country house hotel - except that your hotel is usually being chauffeur-driven across the country at a stately 4mph.

The size of a corridor
I was sampling a floating hotel called Katie which is run by cheerful couple Gail and Cliff Jones. She's a former bus-driver, he was a bus inspector. Now she cooks and opens the locks, while he steers and navigates. The entire accommodation for guests and staff is squeezed into a tube just 70ft long and 6ft 10in wide - that's about the size of the corridor in most hotels on dry land. Nevertheless, ingeniously crammed into my floating corridor were four guest bedrooms - two doubles and two twins - two bathrooms, and a lounge-dining room.

When it rains as much as it did on my trip along the Birmingham and Worcester canal, you can't help noticing it's much smaller than a caravan, coach or train. It's more like sharing the inside of a small aircraft with a group of strangers for several days. You never forget how little space there is. Knees brush as you sit in the lounge, the food is cooked a couple of feet from your table and after dinner we developed a bizarre system of heading off to our bedrooms in the correct sequence, so we wouldn't have to push past each other in the tight gaps between beds and wardrobes.

Tiny rival hotels
Katie is one of about a dozen different hotel boats on the UK's 2,000 miles of inland waterways. Like tiny rival hotels run by husband and wife teams, each boat offers different advantages. 

One boat called Willow, for example, has only one luxurious double ensuite cabin but charges £180 a day full-board for a couple. The Periwinklemeanwhile is 60ft long and only has one double and one single cabin, and they share a bathroom. It's £620 per person per week or £90 a day for short breaks.

It's more traditional to have one boat towing another unpowered boat (called the butty). This articulated hotel formation is offered by two boats called Duke and Duchess.  Between them, Duke & Duchess have accommodation for eight guests in four single cabins, one double cabin and one twin-bedded cabin, but most aren't ensuite. Full board holidays cost around £620 a week per person.

All the boasts offer different cruises on various canals, which are usually a week long, on a full-board basis and you can join in to help with steering and working locks as much or as little as you like.

Lock-opening tools

I've tried a few locks over the years and can't say it's part of the joy of a canal holiday for me. It just seems like a job to be done, like replacing a flat tyre on a car. But I know others find operating the water gates essential experience. One charming retired lady guest on my boat called Di, was so keen she always carries her own lock-opening tool - known as a windlass - in her luggage. Regular boat guests like Di would know to check detailed plans of the boat interiors on hotel websites and brochures before booking. The exact arrangement of rooms onboard alters the whole mood of the boat. 

If you're sharing with strangers for a week you might not want to share a bathroom with them - if you're with a group you may not be so worried about privacy. 

Katie is a new idea because it offers short breaks throughout the season, static B&B in the centre of Birmingham all year round and the double cabins use the full-width of the boat. Gail and Cliff also offer transfers to and from the boat from stations and airports, and if the trip isn't circular they drive you back to where you started.

"We're aiming at attract a wider age-group to canal hotels," says Cliff, who also runs a stylish narrowboat restaurant that cruises around Birmingham's waterways at night. On Katie all the rooms interconnected and bathrooms were shared. It means the rooms are wider because there's no side corridor - but you feel less private. When I woke first in the morning I couldn't walk through the other guests' rooms so had to clamber out through the end of the boat and walk along the towpath to get to the breakfast room at the other end of the boat.

But it all seemed worthwhile late one afternoon when I was sitting on the bows sipping a drink late. Katie was serenely gliding under a huge concrete bridge. Suddenly I realised it was the M42… and it was jammed with noisy, dirty rush-hour traffic. And at that moment the idea of staying in peaceful little narrowboat hotel didn't seem so bad after all.

Factbox

For more information about Katie hotel boat 
Tel 0845 644 5144
away4awhile.com

The price currently includes full board inclusive of wine with dinner, transfer from/to start point: three-night weekend break £295 per person; Static B&B inBirmingham's historic Gas Street Basin £55 per double cabin, including dinner.