Kingsground Narrowboats

Jim, thank you for your comment. Downsizing from two sites to one and opting to build fewer boats per year has meant that we have made redundancies. No business can afford to keep twice as many staff as necessary, it would be a disaster and within just a short time no one would have a job! As I'm sure you are aware, Kingsground Narrowboats are boat builders but we also own a marina and offer many other services. It's all very well assuming that because we may have altered the business to suit the relocation that we may have 'gone out of business' but it's really not very accurate. Businesses change, they have to to survive! They can't keep doing the same thing day in and day out, The world is an ever changing place and consumers want different things at different times. Our building being used as a Heritage Centre encouraged that we use the move to put our eggs into different baskets and have them more evenly balanced to protect our future and offer the business a more secure foundation for trading. None of those made redundant are out of work, they all found jobs within the industry before their notice period ended with us and, testament of their skills. We believe that we have worked hard over the past 24 months to offer a wider variation of services as we very much appreciate that times are difficult financially and more people are looking to repair and rebuild than have a bespoke built boat. Our build schedule has dropped accordingly. Kind regards, Kingsground Narrowboats

Hi to all that have posted, there's so many queries and we obviously want to get them cleared up after today's incident so hopefully this shall answer all of the points or questions raised but if we miss anything out, just let us know. Back in 2010 we considered turning the business Ltd from a partnership but after some more thought we remained as a partnership and therefore dissolved the Ltd company name with Companies House as it has never traded and we shall never use it. This business name was not in any way linked to the partners of Kingsground or attached to the business address so it would take a degree of imagination to link it to us because it could have been any third party that incorporated the name. Waterways World noticed the above and made and assumption, they then headed to press with no phone call, email, fax, letter or text. This was quite a shock and though there's no good time for anything like this to happen, over the winter we have been preparing the re-structure of the business. As some of you already know, for 17 years we have been building our 112 boats from Building 103 Heyford Business Park, Upper Heyford, Oxon, it's situation on the old American Air Base and has been our home for so long that we were heartbroken when the consortium released their housing plans for the base. Our building will remain on the site and become the Heritage Centre. As the oldest building in site it makes so much sense that her future will be telling the history of the base. There's been lots of plans for the building over the years, one set of plans stated she may become a public house called 'The Boat', but those plans never did come to fruition and though we has planning to set up at the Wharf, we got so wrapped up in building boats that we always said 'tomorrow' and tomorrow never came! Until recently when the plans of the heritage site became final and we were finally given official notice. So we are now at Enslow and both operations run from the one site which means we can be by the water enjoying watching the boats go by. It has so many upsides but we still desperately miss building 103, it's where we made made memories, built boats, created dreams, made friends, had happy days and tough. All businesses from time to time have to look at what they're doing and invest time into a restructure if necessary and we saw that this was a good time for us to do just that. We have weathered the storm that is the financial climate but times are not easy for boat builders and it was important that we took this opportunity to offer the services that customers have been demanding. There's a real 'make-do and mend' feel to life now and we have more call for repairs and re-paints than new builds and we would like nothing more than to focus on giving your pride and joy a tickle with the paintbrush! Saying that, we're not wanting to call it a day at 112 crafts .. We love building, it's our passion and we know in time the enquiries shall come flooding back. We realise that compared to many boat builders we are highly fortunate to have other baskets to put our eggs in. We have already lost so many boat builders over the last few years and that leaves us feeling very sad because many of those are losses to the industry. We are really looking forward to our future, we had wanted to re-launch ourselves in Spring, updating you all on our new plans regarding the services we will be offering, the chandlery etc but we find ourself, a little ahead of time, explaining. It appears from reading through the thread that Andrew has been doing some digging for a little while, lots of customers have mentioned now that they had been questioned by him. It's sad really because he only had to ask! We hope this answers pretty much all of your queries but if not please just say and we shall do our very best to reassure you of our position. On the comment made earlier about Enslow Wharf/Marina, it's correct that we have to use the word marina. We have always been Enslow Mill Wharf but it causes confusion for a business located just by the wharf and we were advised that once the boat building was relocated we should use 'marina'. It does make us sound much bigger than we are because as many of you know we have the capability to moor approx 60 boats and it's more of a small community than a big marina! Kind regards The Kingsground Team