The bottle-green narrowboat belonging to Howard and Barbara Sutton cuts a quintessentially English image as she glides along the Gloucestershire canals.

With traditional round windows and the obligatory dog on board, she offers the peculiar, slow-paced charm that has enchanted British holiday-makers for years. The only difference is that this floating holiday home was made in Gdansk.

Canal boat companies and their customers are increasingly turning to Poland, where a world-famous shipbuilding heritage provides the skills that have become a rare commodity in Britain. Particularly appealing is that Polish factories can produce boats of a higher quality, in a fraction of the time – and up to £30,000 cheaper.

The couple began exploring the waterways aboard a small, secondhand, British-built boat four years ago. Then they decided to upgrade. Mr Sutton, 61, said: “I’m a coach builder by trade but I just couldn’t find the quality I was looking for, at the right price.”

Eventually, they found a 60ft Aqualine model by the New Boat Company, one of a handful of British companies with bases in Poland. The Ourone cost the Suttons £71,250.

“I was impressed by the quality of the carpentry, of the finish on the cupboards. There was no MDF. It was all solid wood,” Mr Sutton said. “We looked at lots of different British manufacturers but we kept coming back to the Polish design. A boat builder I knew told me he could do exactly the same thing. The only difference would be my bank balance.”

The company’s factory in Gdansk employs about 75 carpenters, mechanics, designers and engineers, many of whom learned their trades during the heavy industry heyday of the Soviet Union. It produces 70 boats a year for the British market.

The prefabricated parts are made and assembled under the shadow of cranes and rusting tankers at the Gdansk shipyards. The complete boats are delivered by lorry to Britain, where only the curtains and carpets are fitted.

A British builder can take up to a year to build one bespoke boat but the Polish factories can mass-produce 12 boats at a time and complete an order in 14 weeks.

Jon Corker, head of operations at the Aqualine factory in Gdansk, said that his workforce was at first puzzled by the quaint canal craft that had little in common with the industrial ships once exported from the yards when the Baltic port formed the engine room of the Eastern bloc.

He said: “They couldn’t understand how we could sell so many of these strange, flat-bottomed boats. But once they visited England, and they saw the countryside around the canal, they came around.”

The number of people taking to the water in canal boats rose to 450,000 last year. Companies are struggling to find enough builders to satisfy demand.

Mr Corker said: “I understand that people think that canal boats are traditionally British made products and that we are taking [the work] elsewhere. But we just cannot get enough people here to meet our skills requirement.

“We have got a whole workshop of carpenters in Gdansk who we would be stuck to recruit in the UK. Years ago people were a little bit sceptical, but as they see the quality of the boats coming from there, it has gone from strength to strength.”

Noel Creary, sales manager for Amber Boats, based at Evesham, Worcestershire, with a factory in Malbork, near Gdansk, said that it expected to sell about a hundred boats this year, compared with 40 a couple of years ago.

The price of an Amber boat ranges from £57,000 for a 50ft narrow boat to £97,000 for a 60ft beam. Mr Creary said: “Polish builder can provide granite tabletops, quality carpentry.

“If a British builder were to do it at that rate, they would have to use chipwood from B&Q. You just have to do the maths.” The Suttons now want to upgrade their holiday home to a 60ft widebeam boat. This time their commission will go straight from Gloucestershire to Gdansk.

Water ways

2,200

Miles of canal in Britain operated by British Waterways 1,654 locks, 3,115 bridges, 417 aqueducts, 54 tunnels and 111 marinas offering 15,000 berths

29,000

Narowboats in the country

54,000

The number of jobs supported by canals and boating, according to British Waterways 2004 In the summer of this year the actors Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart brought a touch of glamour to canal boating, when they spent their holidays touring the Midlands on one

Source: Times Database, British Waterways

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