A Lee Lighter’s journey

The Drunken Boat is a 1930s Lee Lighter (steel-hulled barge) that we are turning into our dream home, though instead of being moored on water it will be sat on dry land. The Lighter itself is made of 8.5mm wrought steel plate, held together with rivets, made for working the Thames docks back in the day and towed by barge. In its later years it was used for collecting the spoil from dredging works on the Thames before catching our eye when it came up for sale.

For those who like some technical stuff our lighter is 22m long (over-all) and 4.2m wide. Whilst not all this space is usable it will be enough to give us a one-bedroom house which, at the end of the day, is all we need.

Where

The Drunken Boat is being built in the middle of West Sussex, England. The site is boarded by a motorway slip road, a petrol filling station and then the kind of thick, dark, growth of trees that faces look out of. Along with this we have a large municipal roundabout to one corner of the site and the whole thing is over-looked by the A24 running from London to the south coast. Not as random as it sounds – we have family nearby and as we all get older the need to be close at hand makes more and more sense.