Peter Underwood's Page

28/08/2026

A building doesn’t start with grand design. It starts with the mud. The water that guards it. The swallows that return to the exact same rafter, year after century.

27/08/2026

Nearly thirty years ago, our inland waterways journey began. We had bought our first boat—a thirty-two-foot Viking centre cockpit GRP—moored over on the Yorkshire Ouse, and had spent a year or so making weekend journeys down to York, to moor outside the Cathedral.But even that fascination with a wonderful city grows stale after a while and, to reach better cruising grounds with far more route choices, we spent a two week holiday cruising her across the country: navigating the Pennines via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, working through locks and flight after flight, until we brought her down to a new berth here at Venetian Marina.

18/08/2026

The Forgotten Pull: The Era of Horseboating
Commercial horseboating spanned from the late 1700s right up until the 1960s (with the last regular commercial traffic on the Shropshire Union Canal finally ending around 1968).

08/08/2026

Absolutely

Human rights were born from the lessons of Europe's darkest chapter. We shouldn't weaken them in pursuit of immigration policies that won't solve the problems they're meant to address argues Clive Lewis MP.

https://eastangliabylines.co.uk/immigration/a-better-way-to-reform-immigration-and-asylum/

08/08/2026

There is a quiet misconception that to see the world, you must constantly move through it. We march from place to place, chasing the horizon, convinced the next view will be the one that matters. But if you stand completely still... if you pick precisely the right spot... the horizon comes to you

27/07/2026

We first came across this Georgian pile when we spotted it as our narrowboat floated past on the Trent and Mersey canal, and the place was a posh catholic prep school.
So, let’s look at the actual bricks instead. The mid-18th-century Georgian house standing here was actually erected around 1750

19/07/2026

Peace in The Park Animal Style

19/07/2026

No doubt the loony - and often old - climate change deniers will produce their usual garbage about it's just a hot summer; but the real scientists keep demonstrating that the Illiterati are talking nonsense. In this case it is the world respected Met Office putting the boot in to the ignorant gobsh*tes.

16/07/2026

Madock's Port

This place wasn't born naturally—it was literally clawed from the ocean by human ambition, sheer grit, and a global obsession with Welsh stone. This is the story of how a wild estuary became the gateway to the world, and how it reinvented itself for the 21st century.

01/07/2026

This fortress is a monumental lie.
It is not ancient. It is a 19th-century manifestation of pure, unadulterated vanity, commissioned by George Hay Dawkins-Pennant. To walk through its cold, cavernous halls is to walk through an monument erected to the glory of the British aristocracy. But if these hand-carved stone walls could bleed, they would run red with a horror that spans oceans.