ROCK legend Ronnie Wood has gone back to his family roots, buying a canal boat on London’s Regent’s Canal.
The 77-year-old member of the Rolling Stones came from a line of travelling barge people. His parents had boats moored on the Regent’s Canal.
Wood can trace his Romany family roots on the water back to the 1770s. His mother, Elizabeth, was born on a barge and his father was also born on a boat called Antelope.
His father, Arthur, operated a barge throughout the Second World War and he would later take a young Ronnie fishing on the canals.
In August 2024, the two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bought a canal boat on the same canal he had spent some of his childhood on.
Wood is married to his third wife, Sally, and lives in Notting Hill in London. A talented artist who has displayed his work at many exhibitions, Wood may have got his artistic influences from his father, who decorated many narrowboats.
His boat joins a colourful community of vessels on the Regent’s Canal, which stretches 8.6 miles through the capital. The hub is Little Venice and the waterway wends its way past Regent’s Park and Camden Town.
As a boat owner, he has joined a long list of celebrities who have owned or enjoyed holidays on narrowboats. The most famous is the late Timothy West and his wife, Prunella Scales, who featured in the TV series, Great Canal Journeys. The actor died in November.
Most recent are animated characters Wallace & Gromit, who take to a narrowboat in pursuit of criminal penguin, Feathers McGraw. A pursuit across an aqueduct, said to be modelled on the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales, ends with a boat careering off the water.
TV presenter John Craven has also cruised the Llangollen Canal and crossed the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct during a narrowboat holiday.
Poirot actor Sir David Suchet and his wife, Sheila, bought a 52ft narrowboat, Prima Donna, which was moored near Stratford-upon-Avon. The couple spent six years living aboard the vessel and David is still vice-president of the Lichfield & Hatherton Canals Restoration Trust.
Harry Potter actor Timothy Spall and his wife, Shane, owned a Dutch barge, the Princess Matilda, which they took on a televised journey around the UK.
Hollywood A-listers Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart have holidayed on a narrowboat on the Llangollen Canal. More used to the high seas during her roles in Pirates of the Caribbean, Keira Knightley and then-boyfriend Rupert Friend rented a narrowboat in London in 2010.
Finally, children’s TV star Matthew Corbett, famous for the world’s longest running TV show, the Sooty Show, lived alongside the Bridgewater Canal and was a boater for more than four decades.
