AHOY THERE CITY SAILOR

From Chelsea to the canals, Londoners are taking to the water in search of a more peaceful way of life. Jo Rodgers clambers aboard

- Jo Rodgers

NOT far from World's End, the Chelsea neighbourhood of 1970s council blocks and top-tier antique dealers, there's a turn-off toward the Thames that you could pass 100 times without noticing. Next to the Embankment, a pair of planked wooden doors open to a quiet boatyard with a few handfuls of moorings, including the sunny houseboat of Alexandra Pringle (LONDON LIFE Interview, June 2, 2021), a publisher, and her husband, Rick Stroud, a writer and film-maker. A sturdy green gangway (“the Waitrose delivery drivers are sometimes very nervous,' says Alexandra) takes you over the riverbank to a red front door, flanked by hale plants, in terracotta pots and dolly bins, and a brass ship bell.

'It feels like going on holiday. You feel everything fall away and it's extraordinary

When Alexandra moved onto the boat, Veronica, in 1995 (ʻI married into it'), Rick was already living here, having relocated from a 30-acre estate in Wiltshire. He had established a couple of rules: no fussy houseplants, nothing breakable. Rick's daughter, the bestselling author Clover Stroud, lived aboard for a year in her late teens and trashed it,' he says. 'I had calls from the housekeeper constantly. Today, the beadboard walls are lined with shelves displaying Alexandra's collection of 18th-and 19th-century ceramics, as well as thousands of books. Paintings by friends hang above curios collected from France and India—and the antique shops up the road. A fruiting lemon tree, a gift from one of the publisher's authors, grows in a large tub in a corner of the sitting room.