Kilsby Theatre Boat

All hands on deck!

Historic narrowboat Kilsby is being rescued, restored and repurposed as a community boat, offering educational trips, storytelling and theatre on the Oxford waterways.

New! write a poem to help raise funds for Kilsby!

We’ve opened the flood-gates! Bring us your watery poems, your free-flowing verses, your stormy stanzas, your tranquil tercets. Boaters, walkers, swimmers, canal enthusiasts, dreamers and the observers of the nature of water in all seasons, night or day, these are your stories drawn from the poetic bays of your imagination.

Tell us in your unique way: send your poems to us by 23:59 on Sunday, July 7th 2024.

This call to collect your water words is for the 2024 Oxford Canal Festival, which celebrates the city’s canal heritage and also has the important duty of raising essential funds for the restoration Kilsby! Will you one day perform your poetry on her!?

Learn more

Now onto more practical concerns: Kilsby in the boatyard!

Kilsby was dry docked in March to have the hull blacked (coated in bitumen - a standard part of boat maintenance, recommended every 2-3 years)

A team of volunteers donned their finest overalls and wielded rollers and paintbrushes to get the job done.

Massive thanks go to Steph, Robin, Hugo, Helen, Tom, Matt, Steve, Mark, Lisa, John, Setareh, Jack, AK and Sean, for the hours spent in the dock painting away into all those ancient nooks and crannys.

Thanks also to Matt and the team at Tooley’s Boatyard who always make us feel welcome.

“It was a real joy to have the opportunity to get up close to this rare and beautiful 100 year boat and to enjoy the detail of her construction and lovely underwater lines. To be able to do work on her was just a bonus. Tooley’s Boatyard provided the conditions more normal in a museum – well lit, heated and clean”

John - Kilsby Volunteer

Dreaming of an arty Christmas….

Having some Festive fun with local history and the people who have lived it….

In a project made possible by a Connected Communities Fund from Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action (OCVA), Community First Oxfordshire (CFO), and Oxfordshire County Council, we partnered up with The Parasol Project to create a series of Christmas cards that celebrated the living heritage Oxford's Northway estate, the home of Parasol.
Working alongside adults with and without additional needs, we used ipads to capture images of the estate, and held conversations with long-term local residents to gather stories about how the estate has changed since its creation in the 1950s.
Karis Harrington represented the ambitions of the Kilsby Theatre Boat Project. She started with the digital images of the neighbourhood captured by the adults at Parasol, and the nuggets of oral history from the local residents, and using her artistic wizardry combined stories of the past and present into really exciting festive artworks that delight the eye!

In the design here, you can see local resident Frank's dad, a butcher, "Early 1939 John Edward Chesman arrived in Oxford by bicycle from Grimsby, a distance of 168 miles in 2 days. Travelling with my uncle they slept overnight under a bridge, they were woken by police suspecting them of being part of the IRA S-campaign".

We hope to partner with the Parasol Project when they make one of their regular jaunts to Wolvercote Young People's Club in the summer holidays, just a stone's throw from the Oxford Canal. There we will get the opportunity to explore some more ways of interpreting heritage with a waterways twist!

Thanks go to everyone at the Parasol Project, Northway residents Frank, Pam and Pat, and Councillor Barbara Coyne for making this project happen, and of course the funders at OCVA, CFO and OCC.

Restore Kilsby's Stern!

DONATE NOW!

We are delighted to be launching the next phase of the Kilsby Theatre Boat Fundraising campaign.

So far, with your help, Kilsby has been rescued from a watery grave and transported safely to Tooley’s Historic Boatyard in Banbury, where the glorious hull has been safeguarded and wrapped in an enormous new steel slipper (thanks to the Lucy Group of Oxford).

The Kilsby team of volunteers, consultants and experts are working on the exciting long term plans for turning Kilsby into a heritage trip boat and theatre space. Meanwhile, down to immediate practicalities - to restore Kilsby’s hull completely we need to replace the damaged stern and bring it back to its original glory.

DONATE!