Some 3,000 miles of navigable waterways will be almost doubled in a bid to reawaken a historic national asset

“When you’ve lived a busy life, it really is like stepping into another world,” said Fiona Wright, who moved off-grid with her daughter and five dogs when she traded in her Wiltshire home for a 45-foot narrowboat last summer.

Wright’s love of the canals is shared by tens of thousands of people who are taking to the water, and the towpath, in ever greater numbers in a waterways renaissance.

There are now 38,000 narrowboats – one quarter of them are homes – on 3,000 miles of navigable waterways, and the number of people enjoying barge holidays has doubled in recent years. Membership of the Friends of the Canal and River Trust (CRT), the waterways’ version of the National Trust, hit 28,000 this year. Towpaths are teeming with walkers, anglers and cyclists, and there are thousands of volunteers working on 98 canal restoration projects from Devon to West Sussex to Cumbria. The Inland Waterways Association (IWA), the charity that champions canal restoration, is working towards reopening 2,500 miles of “dead” canals which lie derelict.

Wright’s 11-year-old daughter, Emma, who is home-educated, is an ardent advocate of barge life. Her YouTube channel, Narrowboat Girl, which documents their slow journey along the canals, stopping for a while here and there, has attracted more than 100,000 views. “It’s so cool,” said Emma. “I’m learning all the time on the water and the towpath, about birds, animals and plants.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Wright, 11, lives on the water with her mother and five dogs. Photograph: Fiona Wright

Due to be published early this year, a report by the restoration hub of the IWA will emphasise the benefits of canal restoration in terms of economic regeneration, wildlife and plant diversity, architectural heritage, tourism and education. Putting freight back on the canals is also viable, which is why an inland port is being planned in Leeds.

Mike Palmer, the report’s main author, said the canal network was “a huge linear national park – a leisure park, a vital wildlife sanctuary, an important industrial heritage site and an environment-friendly transport system all rolled into one”.

While the report is being digested, the IWA volunteers will be hard at work on projects, which include:

• De-silting work on an abandoned stretch of the Wey and Arun navigation near the Surrey-West Sussex border.

• The completion of a two-year restoration of a hopelessly derelict lock on the Grantham canal in the east Midlands, bringing the Lincolnshire town a step closer to returning to the national network it left more than 80 years ago.

• A redoubling of fundraising efforts by the Lichfield and Hatherton Canals Restoration Trust, which raised the money to build an aqueduct over the M6 toll road 16 years ago despite the fact that there is no canal there (there will be, eventually). Unless work on a tunnel under a railway and a new roundabout starts within a year or so costs will increase enormously. The trust must raise £1m by the end of this year in a campaign led by the actor and canals supporter David Suchet: it has just passed £530,000.

• Taking the next step on one of the most daunting challenges faced by any of the nation’s restoration projects, the Missing Mile on the Cotswold canals, a stretch that was more or less obliterated when the M5 was built. Motorists on the A419 will see narrowboats crossing the middle of a roundabout; there is also junction 13 of the M5 to deal with, plus a major gas pipeline and two more roundabouts. It should be finished by 2023, bringing Stroud back on to the national network.

The IWA’s report aims to change the attitude of funders, politicians, government departments, local authorities, restoration groups and even health professionals. As well as the economic and environmental benefits of canals, it will stress the effects on health, a point made by Philippa Moreton, a retired doctor who advised many of her patients to take towpath walks in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, where she worked.

Moreton said: “Regular exercise in a beautiful, peaceful natural environment with water has an added bonus. It gives a sense of wellbeing, reduces stress and helps depression. Walking beside a canal not only helps patients with diabetes, hypertension, lung disease and arthritis but also patients with mental health problems.”

The report will recommend focusing on micro-projects rather than the entire length of a canal. Restoration should be seen by government agencies and volunteers as a national issue, rather than as a hotch-potch of local groups working in isolation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Cotswold canals project in Stroud will eventually link the Severn with the Thames. Photograph: Alamy

“There was a big gap in terms of looking at things strategically,” said Palmer, who chairs the waterways recovery group, the IWA’s volunteer taskforce.

There are long-running disputes with road builders and planners in Swindon; on the route of the abandoned Berkshire and Wiltshire canal; on the new Bedford and Milton Keynes waterway; and on the Lichfield and Hatherton canal.

“Everybody is struggling with planning permission, with highway crossings, with water abstraction rights,” said Palmer. “This report will say to the government, to the Environment Agency, ‘you need to do better on this’. It’s quite likely that even the bosses of any ministry don’t actually understand that it’s a major issue. They just think it’s dozens of little local issues and don’t spot that they’re joined up.”

Despite this lack of political will, Britain’s canals have had their advocates. In the 1960s, the Queen Mother and the transport minister, Barbara Castle, were among those who spoke up for canals at a time when the attitude of many, especially in local politics, was that they were dirty, dangerous and of no value.

John Dodwell, who has been active in restoring the waterways since 1961 and who chairs the Montgomery Canal Partnership, said that a 1970 conference in Oxford on the urban future of canals “was instrumental in turning the tide with town planners and highway engineers”.

He said: “We need something similar now, especially with road builders.” Dodwell welcomed the IWA report and pointed out that there were no national planning guidelines covering the restoration of canals.

One of the best examples of a self-contained, landlocked restoration that has improved life is in Stroud. The Cotswold canals restoration, a big project that will eventually reconnect the Severn and the Thames, has been heavily supported for 10 years by Stroud district council.

Several miles have been reopened, and the council has moved its offices to Ebley Mill, which was a moribund part of town a few years ago. David Marshall, the council’s canal project manager, said: “The canal used to be a place to avoid – rubbish, derelict, broken locks – and now it’s a place to come to. What we’ve done so far stands on its own two feet.”

The Cotswold project has more than 7,000 members, more than any other canal trust. Palmer, whose main aim is to generate more externally-funded projects on the waterways, said: “We want more people to be involved in the waterways.

“The purpose of our report is to show that you don’t need to fully restore a canal in order to gain all the benefits. If you start with a small piece of restoration and plan it well you will get the benefits right from day one. It might be restoring a kilometre here, restoring a canalside warehouse that becomes a community centre. A lot of people just want somewhere safe to walk, or a cycle path. And when people see one kilometre restored they want the next, and the next…”

One day it will be possible, as it was 150 years ago, to travel by inland waterways from Littlehampton in West Sussex to the Lake District. By road, on a good day, that would take six hours. At the more sedate pace of the canals, where the speed limit is 4mph, it would take weeks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prunella Scales and Timothy West enjoy life in the slow lane on Great Canal Journeys. Photograph: C4

But what’s the rush? The yearning for a slower life, revealed to millions of television viewers by Timothy West and Prunella Scales in the nine series of Channel 4’s Great Canal Journeys, is one of the big attractions of the inland waterways.

The most popular writer on canals was Tom Rolt, the godfather of canal restoration who helped found the IWA. In his hugely popular and still in-print 1944 book, Narrow Boat, he said that canal travel “seemed to me to fulfil in the fullest sense the meaning of travel as opposed to a mere blind hurrying from place to place”.

He wrote: “To step down from some busy thoroughfare on to the quiet towpath of a canal, even in the heart of a town, is to step backward a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and perhaps more balanced, perspective.”

Fiona and Emma Wright could not agree more.