The lovely Sam Kemp from National Geographic came to one of our Songs on the Water events onboard, and spoke to us for his beautiful article 'The Time Traveler's Guide to London'. Here's the full interview transcript, which we've provided because we really enjoyed talking with Sam, and it's one of the rare times we've put into writing some of the ideas behind Theatreship.
Sam: Tell me a bit about the ship’s past and how it came into your hands?
Inigo: The ship is really special, 113 years old this year. A hundred of those years were spent constantly trading cargo around the Northern European port cities. She started life as a sail-powered coastal cargo Klipper in 1913 and then over the next century was continuously modified: lengthened, patched, re-plated, re-engined, re-engined again. We’re only at the very end of a long chain of people who’ve loved this boat, and tried to keep her going in each new decade she’s found herself in. Now, in 2026, the London docks don’t import the freight they used to, and her cargo of grain has been replaced with a cargo of films, songs, and conversations.
My personal background is in raising and repairing sunken historic ships (and their aging engines). I first came to Canary Wharf to repair a steam tug that sank here in 2019. Over two years working on that job, I fell in love with the docks: it's this incredible waterspace right in the heart of London, deeply connected to the city's history of work and migration, and to the people still living and working in East London today. It felt like a real privilege to have access to this water, and I wanted to share that: to open the docks up as a public space. So, we set about finding a suitable ship. We found the boat that would become Theatreship in Drachten, in the Netherlands. In 2022, we sailed her across the North Sea to London under her own power (only 109 years after she first started trading). We restored her right here, and opened to the public in 2024 as a new arts centre.
Natalie: I first joined Theatreship 4 years ago. I’m a filmmaker by trade and originally planned to make a documentary about the ship’s renovation into the world’s largest floating art centre! But I then fell entirely in love with the project and with being on the water so ended up becoming a director of Theatreship and now run the film programming onboard. Throughout my working life I’ve spent more time producing work than curating it but being involved in the programming onboard and seeing the joy has really changed me - partly because of the content, partly because of the ship, but above all because of the wonderful community of people that anchor here.
Sam: How has that past influenced the events held here today? I’m thinking specifically of the Songs on the Water nights.
Inigo: The whole point of the project was to reflect the history of the river. But not in a fossilised, archival way - instead as a living connection to a community and identity that's endured for hundreds of years. Songs on the Water is a great example. The night frees songs trapped in archives and gives them back to living voices. We find that singing together ends up creating this powerful connection, both to each other, and to all the people who’ve sung these songs before.
Many of the sea songs we sing in Songs on the Water were once written to unite people from different backgrounds in shared labour - pulling ropes and establishing working rhythms in crews drawn from all over the world (some 30% of the British Merchant Navy before WW2 were Lascar seafarers from the Indian subcontinent, echoing the living demographic in Tower Hamlets - Theatreship’s home - today). Onboard Theatreship in 2026 the labour may have changed, but the purpose of these songs remains: to bring people together.
Sam: To what extent would you say the Thames and its maritime past has shaped the culture of London?
Inigo: Enormously! London was built by ships on a very fundamental level. For centuries, arriving sailing ships would dump their ballast in the Thames to make room for cargo - depositing tonnes of rock from their home ports into the river bed. If you walk the mud at low tide today, you can still find volcanic rock, a very long way away from any volcanoes! London’s physical terrain is an aggregate of the wider world.
Its cultural terrain is too - but culturally the city is more than just an aggregation. There’s a real alchemy to port cities. You get people and ideas coming from all over the world and landing in one place. It's the entirely new creations that emerge from that mixture that make London London. In our own small way we try to continue that dockland alchemy onboard, providing a shared space for people, ideas, and art forms to arrive and mix, and celebrating what emerges from that chemistry.
We bring in Bhatiali folk songs from Sylhet, independent films from the Amazon, and modern history plays from the Peloponnese. We also mix art forms - pairing classic silent cinema with new live electronic scores for instance. This process of importing and mixing brings very different people together for very different reasons in a shared space. The conversations, connections, and artworks born from this process might be entirely new, but really what we do is just a continuation of what the docks were built for: using ships to connect the city to the rest of the world.
Sam: During my research, I’ve met a few people for whom the river and its foreshore represent a sort of freedom from the individualistic, money-first culture typically associated with modern London. Would you agree, and if so, why do you think that is?
Natalie: Having spent the last 4 years living and working on water, I think the freedom associated with the river is partly to do with the movement - the freedom to keep going, not settling down to conformity - but it’s also to do with a sense of community and sharing space. We share the docks with some of the largest companies in the world and super yachts but we also share it with nesting coots, ducks, Canadian geese, swans, kayakers and the boats full of volunteers collecting litter (Theatreship and Artship are perfect nesting spots so we have newcomers each year!).
It was really important for Theatreship to keep this idea of sharing space, which is why it was so important to bring together a melting pot of arts and culture - and have so much programming for free. We wanted the venue to be truly accessible whatever someone’s circumstances.
The land around the river also represents freedom. The Thames Path National Trail is a protected continuous route but there are many places that are now restricted. I can understand why it’s such a desirable location for developers, hotels and homeowners but there needs to be real care that this isn’t restricted just to those who can afford to live there. Just as we want Theatreship to be accessible to all, the river should be too.
Inigo: Absolutely! I think there’s a couple of parts to that. I think it’s good to be reminded, sometimes, that not everything is within your control. Even this interview was postponed to coincide with the tides - there’s a freedom in accepting that sometimes things are bigger, older, and more powerful than even our best inventions.
Even in Canary Wharf, a deeply and impressively man-made environment, the river refuses to be overruled. There are some beautiful stalactites that appear around the dock walls, as the concrete dissolving from the skyscrapers trickles into the dock water… I can imagine that in thousands of years time as that process continues, the buildings would become worn down stumps, and the stalactites would be enormous, but the river would still be there: underneath that inverted skyscape. There’s a real freedom in that sense of deep time that the river and its process represents. I hope there will still be people singing and dancing on the river then, too, as there have been for the previous several thousand years. I’d be thrilled if it’s still on a very elderly and much-repaired Theatreship!
The river isn’t just an untamed, unknowable force though - I think it represents an important counterpoint to the individualistic culture you mentioned, as something essentially shared: the river is part of the inheritance of everyone in London, we all have a collective entitlement to it. It provides a direct connection to our common past - with pieces of our history washing up every day in the mud of the river banks. Just like the working songs we sing onboard, the river reminds us that this city was built on collective effort and shared spaces, not just individual pursuit.