The Medway eco barge might serve as a cautionary tale to Londoners looking to leave dryland in order to find more space and freedom.
The lesson being: plan ahead.
The barge, which featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs in 2007, was seemingly built on good intentions alone.
Ambitious Londoners Chris Miller and wife Sze Liu Lai wanted to escape the confines of their tiny East London flat and make a family home on the water.
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Chris and Sze spent £10,000 on an old steel barge
(Image: Channel 4)
They were, however, only going to use eco-friendly, second hand materials and not follow a set design.
This led to the project being plagued by arguments with builders, fallouts with dock owners, and impractical or sometimes downright ugly design features.
One builder memorably commented to Kevin McCloud’s Channel 4 team: “It looks s***.”
It seems that even at the time host Kevin saw a disaster on the horizon dubbing the project as “a floating scrapheap challenge”.
He remarked in a later interview: “The project was compromised from the beginning. They were not prepared properly and were relying on happenstance.”
The poorly fitting windows ended up being a major issue with the project
(Image: Channel 4)
Indeed, fortune was not on the couple’s side.
After ploughing £80,000 into the project, the barge was barely habitable and lacked basic utilities like running water, electricity and heating.
When the couple ran out of funds a decision was made to moor the boat in the Thames Estuary until they could drum up more money to make the floating family home more liveable.
However this was not the end of this Grand Designs’ flop.
In 2011 it made national headlines after it became released from its moorings and washed up on a not-so glamorous beach in Essex, where observers revelled in its misery.
Without heating and basic utilities the barge wasn’t fit for habitation
(Image: Channel 4)
The barge had been vandalised, its mismatched windows broken, its corrugated roofing rusting – it looked anything but grand.
The Guardian wrote that the failed project provided ‘the nation with the opportunity to laugh at the misfortunes of privileged Londoners.’
Despite the negative attention there were plans by Chris to revive the project, but the damage done would cost in excess of £70,000 to repair.
So, for now at least, Chris and Sze’s dreams of escaping their small London flat are all washed up.
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