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Paper short abstract:

London's continuously re-purposed waterways occupy a hybrid, convivial space that has become home to itinerant boat dwellers who both make places and have their places made in a socio-natural dialectic that reflects, reveals and creates claims to belong.

Paper long abstract:

London's waterways were originally built as 'ruthlessly efficient arteries of the industrial revolution, unconcerned with notions of place or community' (Knight, D., 2010; p218). This pre-dated industry-centric logic still carves it's way through the city occupying socio spatial margins that have been continuously repurposed (Scovazzi, 2016).

In 1995 boaters took advantage of British Waterway's new affordable Continuous Cruising licence which meant full-time, live aboard cruising. The increase in boaters turned 'watery regions of refuge' (Scott, 2012) into bustling 'linear villages' (Bowles, 2015), causing concern about over-crowding and the future of Continuous Cruising in the city. Contention between 'newbies' and 'old-timers' (Bowles, 2015) lead to territoriality and hierarchies of belonging on the waterways (Back, 2012). Firstly I discuss how these hierarchies are embodied and performed. Secondly, belonging is not only explicit in the actions of boaters, but implicit in the bodies of those who make claims to belong in certain places. If places are made through repeated, everyday actions that work on both the neighbourhood and the individual (Benson and Jackson, 2012), belonging may be maintained through the understanding of the bodies that dwell there. In a Canal and River Trust survey 77% of London Continuous Cruisers identified as 'White English/British' (CRT, 2016). I ask whether the waterways mimic the countryside as a 'white landscape' (Agyeman and Spooner, 1997) and reproduce the pervading understanding of natural places as a white spaces?