National Small Boat Collection

Shrimp is the first of the Norfolk Punt class, one of Britain’s oldest high performance classes. The class evolved directly from traditional working gun punts used for hunting wildfowl in…

This rather unremarkable looking little boat was not created in a conventional boat yard, but was designed and built in 1950 by a firm of metal fabricators based in Birmingham.…

Granta, a British firm, was established in 1932. Between that time and the 1960s it sold thousands of canoes and kayaks from a range which peaked at 48 models.  The…

  Although a distinct design in its own right, in many ways Sea Queen looks like a smaller version of the better known Looe Lugger or Falmouth Working Boat. Mevagissey…

The Optimist dinghy, designed in the United States of America, spread via Scandinavia to become arguably the largest sailing class in the world. The boat owes its popularity to low…

The International C Class Catamaran Championship is one of the sailing world’s legendary and amongst the most eagerly anticipated events. In 2013, for the first time since 1969, the championship…

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the British war office recognised a need for a small boat that could be used for covert reconnaissance and assault…

The Olympic Monotype, or O-Jolle as it is also known, was designed by Helmut Stauch as the single-handed dinghy for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, for which the yachting events…

During the early part of the 20th century, post-war Britain was pursuing high speed technology. Between 1922 and 1936, for example, Sir Malcolm Campbell broke no less than twelve land…