The prize for ‘abandoned vehicle of the year’ goes to… a boat that has mysteriously been abandoned on Queenstown Road! It’s all a bit of a mystery – it’s in reasonably good condition, it seems watertight, and it has even been abandoned with a fully functional tow frame.

There’s fresh paint and it has the look of a fairly careful and dedicated boat restoration project abandoned part way. There are tools and the start of a kitchen, with what looks like a new cooker inside.

It has a somewhat out of date mooring permit! Maybe someone with more knowledge of boats than us can confirm if this means the boat was once called ‘Christine’.

We have to say, this poor boat seems a long way from home! But it raises so many questions. How did it get here? Was this a case of ‘the boat goes or I go’? Did someone run out of cash or just decide they’d had enough? Did someone’s mooring permit expire leaving them with no choice but to dump it in the middle of Battersea?

Either way, the Arch Company who own the land don’t seem too impressed – as taped to the vessel there are CCTV stills of a gentleman driving up and abandoning it on the 16th December (seemingly without making much attempt to hide his identity), with a request “Please remove this boat within 24 hours! Alternatively we will arrange”.

Can you solve the mystery of the Battersea boat? Do you want a boat (one careless owner)? Can boats get parking tickets? Will this boat ever see the water again? We’ll keep you posted if we find out more.

Update: There’s a twist to this story!

While preparing an unrelated future post on office developments on Ingate Place, a couple of hundred metres away from the boat’s current location, we dug out one of our archive photos of Ingate Place (taken back on the 18th September) – and spotted a very familiar looking boat in it! It’s clearly the same boat, in the same trailer… but with a bit less white paint. So this boat is indeed local, and there has been some restoration work done while it was on Ingate Place before it was moved a short distance and abandoned. Whoever abandoned it didn’t take it far – and maybe it is indeed a Battersea boat…