This weekend was my first visit to a canal traders market, and Birmingham’s event is reported to be Britain’s biggest floating market. The three day event, beginning on Friday 25th September, welcomed 24 trade boats to a stretch of towpath near the National Indoor Arena. Colourful narrowboats were decorated with bunting and they sold books, handicrafts and gifts,fenders and ropes, plants and seeds, woollen fashion garments, painted plates, art prints, photographs, antiques and more.

We accessed the market from Brindleyplace; a relatively new canal-side development, in the Westside district of Birmingham. The network of canals at the heart of Birmingham was once the site of factories in the industrial age, but by the 1970s many of the buildings lay derelict. Today the area is buzzing with cafes and bars, shops and restaurants. Shiny office buildings tower over modern water features and footbridges over the canal link Brindleyplace to the International Convention Centre. (Canal enthusiasts may be aware that Brindleyplace is named after the 18th century canal engineer James Brindley.)

Each narrowboat “shop” is an individual travelling business, but the Roving Canal Traders Association organises floating markets and events throughout the summer to bring roving canal traders together to improve trading opportunities, and to raise the profile and public awareness of roving canal traders. Members of the RCTA sell a diverse range of products including coal and diesel, painted canal ware, crafts, art, food and drink, jewellery, herbs, fenders, and souvenirs.

At this weekend’s market one of the more unusual traders was The Homebrew Boat, offering beer, wine, cider and spirits homebrew kits and canal orientated greetings cards. The antiques boat offered items related to canal history such as horse brasses and a couple of original Measham teapots. Measham Ware is earthen ware; it has a dark brown lead glaze usually painted with white flowers and a personalised motto. These were once very popular with those who lived and worked on the canals. One of the teapots pictured below is personalised to a 'Mrs T Barnett, Rugby 1879' with a price tag of £135. The other has a miniature teapot upon the lid and is inscribed 'God Bless Our Home'.

If you’d like to live and work on the canals then maybe you could become a canal boat broker.

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