Steel hull, built for the network's wider bits and the parts most narrowboats can't get into.
A narrowboat is seven feet of beam and a corridor with rooms off it. A widebeam is twelve feet, and twelve feet is enough for a proper galley, a sofa you can actually get past, and a bath instead of a shower cubicle built for someone smaller than you. The cost is the network itself — there are stretches of canal, and plenty of locks, that simply won't take the width, so the map of where we can go is a lot smaller than a narrowboat's. We made the trade on purpose.
She was built in 2014 as a residential widebeam, not a converted barge or a one-off self-build, which mattered for insurance and for not spending the first two years fixing someone else's first attempt. The layout's barely changed since — two cabins, a single bathroom amidships, and a saloon at the stern that catches the evening sun on the towpath side, whichever side that happens to be that week.
Water, diesel, coal, and the Elsan point are the four things that actually govern where we moor and for how long — not scenery, whatever the brochures for this kind of life would have you believe. We carry a week of water if we're careful, and the boatyard at Bulls Bridge has become the default stop for everything else: diesel, gas, a pump-out, and somewhere to leave the boat for a few days when life on land needs more attention than the cut does.