Delivery swans, millionaire neighbours and the wonders of a ...

‘Maria was actually due to give birth on that boat,” says Aisha Mirza with a half sigh, half laugh. “We were all excited, but she ended up starting labour early and having the baby in the hospital. Then she brought the baby to the boat and I got to photograph their first few days together. That was really special.”

Mirza, an artist and writer, is speaking via Zoom, sitting outside on a bench on a sunny autumn day talking me through some of the photographs in their new exhibition and smiling. WWWADING, is a five-year culmination of photography and oral history collected along the canals of London with a focus on boaters of colour. Inspired by the idea of what they call “a marginalised people choosing a marginalised way of life”, the photographs are an ode to a community of queer or disabled boaters in their natural habitat, who don’t often have a lens on their existence.

Mirza is half Pakistani and Egyptian (and a boater) and talks about how water is a part of their present and ancestral history. “One of the things that unites a lot of black and brown people is that we have movement in our lineages. Whether that’s violent displacement, migration, economic movement, we’ve all sailed on seas to get here and end up on this strange land. So it felt obvious that communities of colour occupying these spaces would be explored.”

Mirza started asking boaters unusual questions. How has water shown up in the history of your family? How do boats inform how you live now? “One person I was interviewing was like: ‘Well, the British build canals. That’s what they do.’” The idea of colonial capitalism carved into the earth via watery networks gives the work a critical edge. “It’s considered an incredible feat of engineering despite facilitating colonialism and control through commerce and capitalism. Large areas of marshland were destroyed to build these and land never recovers.”

The name WWWADING elicits ideas of watery struggle and the web, which puts us in a modern world, despite our desire to escape it at times. Mirza describes wanting to be as close to off-grid living as you can in a city. “When I first moved on to a boat, I was saying I was off grid as a joke until I realised that people living on boats in London are for the most part not tapped into any of the main grid systems. For constant cruisers, like me, who move my boat every two weeks, we’re managing our own water, we’re creating our own electricity, using solar power and gas from bottles. It’s quite hardcore.”

The pictures speak to how people are using home-making as an act of resistance against the high costs of London living. From the inclusion of mobility scooters on boats to signs declaring “THE TRUTH IS IN THE SOIL” (“I heard there’s one that says Compost The Rich, but I couldn’t find it”) or display pieces of Indian and Pakistani flags kissing.

One photograph captures a boater on a towpath doing someone’s hair in a tender show of communion; another is of a boater, Esme, eating a Pot Noodle. “She makes ceramics using clay foraged from the towpath,” says Mirza. “She has this tiny boat and she has an enormous dog on it. It’s as big as her.” There’s humour in the shots too. “There’s two swans who’ve swum up to my front door – and you can see an Amazon box.”

One photograph captures a person in a “Boaters Fightback” T-shirt, referencing a growing movement to resist the government’s support of privatisation of land around the waterways. “The canals used to be a place of working-class labour, but now they’re a place of waterfront views and million-pound flats,” sighs Mirza. “Residents overlooking the beautiful waterways of London don’t necessarily want to see poor people living in boats.”

Mirza’s photographs capture the neighbourliness of boaters. We talk about a picture they took of their ex-wife in a bath despite a bath being almost impossible to install. “The hardest thing for me about living on a boat is not having a bath. I’m a water baby, but I live on a boat on water as polluted as the London waters are so I can’t swim!”

We discuss this conflict that governs so much of our lives: choosing to live in a city that is not always great for our health, and maybe being a constant cruiser makes that easier to manage. We’re silent for a moment thinking of how we all navigate political, social, cultural pollution – and suddenly Mirza smiles and we discuss the bath picture and how people create glimmers of sun for themselves. “She just looks so beautiful with her gaze and being really present,” they say happily. “For a moment, you forget the capitalist real estate treadmill – and you’re given these moments. That’s what I’m living for.”

• WWWADING is at the Floating Garden, London, 9-15 October