In the days before steam, sailing barges were a common sight on the British coast, its rivers, estuaries, broads and river navigations. The most well-known of these vessels are probably the Thames barges and Norfolk Wherries. Whole communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were based around the ownership of fleets of barges which were essential to the commercial infrastructure of the areas where they were from. The 1920s saw the gradual decline of the use of barges but they were far more in their whole than the articulated machinery that replaced them.

Sailing Barges of the British Isles describes the skills required for building and maintaining barges, as well as sailmaking, shipwrighting and sailmanship were spread across the maritime world in Britain and through generations.