The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  I had never been to Tewkesbury before, but I had grown up in provincial towns that looked very much like it and I understood why people were fascinated by the photograph: it signalled the end of a way of life denoted by the trinity of church, marketplace and river. It confirmed that the future no one wanted to contemplate was happening now.

  ~

  Most of the time, I find it easy not to think about climate change. I used to think about it more. I remember lying on the lawn in the back garden of our house during the heatwave that struck Northern Europe in the summer of 2003, seized with panic at the thought of the ecological disaster we were inviting: the rising seas, the droughts and floods, the influx of refugees from the south – these did not seem like abstract possibilities anymore; they were present in the humid warmth on my skin and the sound of our neighbours’ voices drifting through the doors and windows of the fetishized Victorian houses of North London, which had been temporarily relocated to a climate where life was lived outdoors.

  My sense of impending disaster didn’t last. The usual excuses prevailed: I didn’t want to change the way I lived, and I didn’t think it would make any difference if I did. Besides, I had other things to think about. As the years passed, I became the kind of person who did the school run in a T-shirt in November and passed it off with a joke about it being nice for the time of year. But even I found it hard to ignore the floods.

  For years, meteorologists had warned that climate change would bring warm, wet winters, but it was the summer floods of 2007 that made me think about our new weather. There were more floods in subsequent years, often in places that I knew and loved: Morpeth flooded in 2008; the Lake District towns of Cockermouth and Keswick in 2009; Cornwall in 2010. Thousands of people drowned in China in May and June 2010, adding a new chapter to the Yellow River’s history of destructive floods. In January 2011, 700 people drowned in Brazil, in its worst ever floods, and, in April, the Mississippi burst its banks.

  In Britain, 2012 was another year of climatic extremes of the kind we were getting used to. It started with a drought: there were hosepipe bans in March, but April was the wettest on record and flooding inevitably followed. Summer brought more freak weather: hailstones the size of golf balls fell in the Midlands and a downpour dubbed ‘the Toon Monsoon’ struck Newcastle, leaving a block of flats in the east of the city poised on a set of fragile stilts on the edge of the cascading torrent that had swept away the ground beneath it. In November, New York was left without power for days when Hurricane Sandy crashed into the eastern seaboard, sending water coursing through its streets and flooding its subways.

  Autumn in the UK was mild at first. A ‘blood rain’, thickened and tinted by dust from the Sahara, was forecast for Halloween, but it turned out warm and dry. We told our kids they had to wear something beneath their polyester witch’s dress and skeleton onesie, but they could have gone out in ripped sheets and make-up, like their grown-up counterparts, who followed the glowing trail of pumpkins from door to door, with joke-shop knives through their heads and faces smeared with gore. Crowds of ghouls gathered on street corners. Apple bobbing – the only Halloween ritual I remember from my childhood – was not an ordeal. If it hadn’t been for the fading light and the leaves that tumbled around our feet as we walked, it would have felt like a celebration of spring, instead of a welcoming of winter.

  Two days after Halloween, it started raining again, and the temperature dropped. The leaves turned crisp with frost and then collapsed into a slippery mush that glossed the pavement and made it shine like a trout’s slick, speckled skin. Outside London, rain fell on saturated ground. One man drowned after his car was washed down a flooded brook in Somerset, and another when his car overturned in Devon. Three hundred flats and houses flooded in England and Wales in the course of a single day, and a cliff collapsed in Whitby, taking several houses with it. Morpeth flooded for the second time in four years, and the town of St Asaph, in North Wales, was engulfed when the River Elwy burst its banks. I would go to both of these places in the course of the year. Yet it was the news that Tewkesbury had flooded again that interested me the most. I had had a copy of the photograph of Tewkesbury in the summer of 2007 pinned to my wall since I started reading about flooding, and when I heard that the rivers that converge upon the town had burst their banks and were rising towards the abbey again, I decided to go and see it for myself.

  ~

  I left London on an early train. There was flooding on the outskirts of Reading. The banks of the Thames had disappeared beneath a grey sheet of water. An avenue of half-submerged trees showed where the river used to run. There was no sign of a current beneath the placid lake. Goalposts confirmed the function of a field and plumbed the water’s depth. Moored boats swung in line beside us, as close as carriages on an adjoining track.

  The station at Tewkesbury was two miles outside town. A poster advertising A Party on the Beach hung on a fence sealing a derelict plot of land on the edge of an industrial estate beside the station. I crossed the bridge above the M5 and followed a long straight road lined with modern and Victorian houses. Welcome to Tewkesbury: Historic Riverside Town, a sign said. The turning to a village called Walton Cardiff had flooded: a Severn Trent Water sign said work was due to start in September, but the water was too deep to come from a burst main. It filled a lane that ran down the side of a new estate to a playground. It reached the top of my boots, but lay below the lip of the concrete plinth on which the houses had been built. The fields were placid ponds, sealed within the embankments that carried the roads. A stream passing beneath a bridge had become part of the lake. These were the city’s floodplains, the vicar of Tewkesbury Abbey would say, and the sunlight reflecting off the silvered fields was beautiful when you drove into town – so long as the water stayed within their confines.

  The worst flooding was in the street behind the hospital, where a narrow tributary of the Severn, called the Swilgate, had burst its banks. It had been even higher earlier in the week, said a man standing on the metal bridge above the branch-clogged torrent. If I had come the day before, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the hospital, for the dark brown water lapping at the verges of the road had risen as high as its back door. They were building a new hospital on an adjoining site; work had resumed for the first time in several days, and the skate park was drying out. Yet the water was only just passing beneath the bridge; it had spread out so far that the man couldn’t tell where it normally ran.

  My friend – who told me his name, but asked me not to use it – had lived in a block of flats on the far bank since 1975, and he had only seen the Swilgate as high as this once before. ‘They said 2007 was meant to be a one-off, but this is looking sinister as well,’ he said. It was a well-chosen word: it conveyed the sense, which many people seemed to share, that flooding was not a natural phenomenon, but the consequence of a conspiracy directed against them. Yet he had no interest in the climatic changes that may have contributed to the downpours. ‘Global warming, global cooling: they have no idea what’s going on,’ he said. It was the first time I had come across the disdain for expert advice that would become so apparent in the Somerset Levels in the winter of 2013. All he knew was that they got the rain that fell in Wales three or four days earlier – and there had been a lot of it.

  It had come up without warning, said a man sweeping a tidemark of dirt off his drive, further down the road. He had woken up on Saturday morning to find the water lapping at the drive, and had taken out his boat, paddled across the cricket pitch and taken pictures looking back at his house, which had become a lakeside villa. He spoke with a rich Gloucestershire accent, but he was dressed like a biker from the American South, with a quiff and a cut-off denim jacket adorned with a Union flag. There was a motorbike with low-slung handlebars parked in the drive and a photograph of a woman riding one like it hung inside the front door. He hadn’t been living in Tewkesbury in 2007, but his wife had, and she’d had eighteen inches (almost half a metre) of water in the h
ouse. He didn’t think it would get high enough to get over the lip of the front door this time, though he was worried that it might rise through the drains at the side and flood the workshop where he kept another bike.

  The Mill Avon, the river that the monks of Tewkesbury Abbey had built to drive water through their mills on the western edge of town had also burst its banks. I walked along the edge of the lake that had emerged from the river, trying to guess the layout of the submerged streets and footpaths by the objects that broke the surface. The top half of a postbox marked the position of a pavement, a Resident Permit Holders Only sign indicated parking spaces, and a set of steps leading down into the water marked a riverside path. A sign warned of boats manoeuvring for the locks, though I couldn’t see the locks themselves, for the water had submerged the apparatus designed to subdue it. Boats had become clumsy objects, tethered in awkward postures by their foreshortened ropes: a barge had drifted against a metal fence, and a dinghy was dragged down at its bow – any further rise in the level of the water would sink it. The water was barely passing beneath the arches of the bridge at the end of the high street. The arches were not a conduit anymore: they were a barrier. The Mythe Bridge, half a mile out of town, carried a single lane of traffic over the Severn, where boat-club dinghies were beached on the muddy shore. Beyond it lay the solid red-brick mass of the Mythe Water Treatment Works, which had flooded in 2007, leaving thousands of people dependent on water from bowsers. Water had spilled through its gate and lay in puddles in its grounds.

  I walked back towards Tewkesbury and turned into a cul-de-sac of terraced houses called King John’s Court. It occupied an island between two arms of the River Avon – though, for the time being, the layout of the rivers was obscured, as well as the layout of the streets. Judging by the way the railings diminished in height as they sank into the water, the street sloped downhill, though it rose again in front of the lock-keeper’s cottage in the middle of the stream, where a submerged bench looked out across the drowned fields.

  The way the water mirrored the trees and clouds made me think of the descriptions of ‘the Lake’, the ‘inland sea’ that covers central England in After London: or, Wild England by the Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, which imagines the collapse of modern civilization, and the feudal society that replaces it. ‘At the eastern extremity the Lake narrows, and finally is lost in the vast marshes which cover the site of the ancient London,’ writes the novel’s unnamed narrator. He does not know exactly how the Lake formed, but he speculates that ‘changes of the sea level’ threw up great sandbanks at the mouth of the Thames, while a ‘broad barrier of beach’ obstructed the mouth of the Severn; once the respective eastward and westward flow of the rivers was blocked, they ‘turned backwards . . . and began to cover hitherto dry land.’ London becomes a foul, decaying swamp, but ‘the Lake’ is as ‘clear as crystal, exquisite to drink, abounding with fishes of every kind, and adorned with green islands.’

  I was contemplating Tewkesbury’s ‘Lake’ when I became aware of a man watching me from the window of a nearby house. I walked over to him and he opened the window just far enough to be able to speak.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said, in the English way that implies he did not want to help at all.

  ‘I’m just looking at the water,’ I said, which must have sounded equally indirect.

  He was more concerned about burglars than flooding; his neighbour’s car had been stolen the previous day and he was worried the thieves might come back. He seemed reassured that I was not a threat, but his manner didn’t change, for he was sceptical of flood tourists, like me, and other people who fail to appreciate that Tewkesbury always floods. His house was perfectly safe, he said, despite being located on a promontory enclosed on three sides by water. ‘These houses were built with flooding in mind,’ he said, indicating the slab that raised the front door half a metre above the ground.

  He conceded that the water was higher than usual and was taking longer to subside, but he said he had never been concerned, for an enormous volume of water was required to affect a rise in the level across the thousands of acres of floodplain in which Tewkesbury was located. A family had had to be rescued in Sandhurst, Gloucestershire, ten miles downstream; flood defences failed in Kempsey, Worcestershire, twelve miles upstream; and even the White Bear, which stands on the main road, had flooded – but King John’s Court had remained untouched. ‘Personally, I don’t see a problem for us, here,’ the man said. ‘There is a problem in other places, but that’s the subtle difference with Tewkesbury: we don’t try and stop the water; we just let it flow through.’

  I was impressed by his confidence, though I was not entirely convinced that he was right to be so calm, for the margins seemed very fine, despite all the efforts made to raise the houses above the water’s reach. Yet it wasn’t until I went back to Tewkesbury, on a spring day in May 2013, six months after my first visit, that I realized how the water had transformed the town, even in the course of a flood that some people insisted was routine. It was the Swilgate that surprised me the most. The wide brown lake that the biker had boated across was revealed as a cricket pitch, with covers and sight screens – vertical and horizontal squares of gridded white slats – arranged beneath the tower of the abbey, which stood on a hill, far from water of any kind. The Swilgate, which had been a dark brown, slow-moving current, spilling across the skate park and the road and lapping at the doors of the hospital, had subsided into the bottom of a deep, thickly grassed channel that wound through the meadow below the abbey and on into the sheep-dotted fields on the edge of town. It was so narrow that there were places where I could step across it. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed how high it had risen or how far it had spread – and yet it had been even higher in 2007.

  ~

  The early summer of 2007 was unusually wet: between May and July, 414 millimetres of rain fell across England and Wales, making it the wettest period since records began, in 1766. When it started raining again at the end of July, there was nowhere for the water to go. Two months’ worth of rain fell in Tewkesbury on the afternoon of Friday, 20 July and during the next two days, the town was hit by three floods of escalating severity.

  The Swilgate was the first to burst its banks, for it was swollen by water pouring off the saturated fields. ‘At first, no one was unduly concerned,’ said John Badham, a local councillor and retired head teacher, who lived in Abbey Terrace, a row of Georgian houses beside the main road leading south, towards Cheltenham. Local wisdom says that as long as you can see the benches on the high ground on the far side of the Vineyards, the field that lies below Tewkesbury Abbey, then there is no need to worry. I had noticed the benches during my first visit, in November 2012, when the Vineyards were under water, and they were visible at seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, 20 July 2007. Mr Badham and his wife went out for a curry, and, by the time they got back, there was a foot (thirty centimetres) of water in their house.

  The current was so strong, it was hard to stand up in it. It picked up a heavy wooden table and shifted it across the room. ‘It was very frightening,’ he told me, when I arrived at his house, having followed the thin blue thread of the Swilgate through the Vineyards to Abbey Terrace. ‘It came up so high,’ he said, indicating the top of the Aga. It was nearly a metre deep – roughly the height of one of the two black Labradors that were bustling around the kitchen, bouncing off each other and clanking their warm, heavy heads against my knees. He showed me a framed black-and-white picture of a cart standing outside Abbey Terrace during another flood, in 1924: the water came halfway up its wheels. ‘It was deeper than that in 2007,’ he said, before apologizing and correcting himself with a joke that he also apologized for: ‘I mustn’t exaggerate. I must be careful. I am a natural exaggerator. My great-grandfather was an Irishman. It was his fault.’

  John Badham was in his sixties, a tall man, dressed in cords and a sweater. He was a former prep school headmaster who had taught
in London and Hereford before he retired and moved to Tewkesbury. It was not new territory for him. He was born in Cheltenham, eight miles south following the road that ran past his front door, and his family owned a chain of chemist shops nearby, including one in Bishop’s Cleeve, the village where the Swilgate rises, seven miles to the west. John had profited from the area’s post-war development through the growth of the family business, though the water that flowed through the drains ended up in his front room.

  I thought he was entitled to regard himself as a local, but the locals didn’t agree. When he had started a campaign to relocate the war memorial from its inaccessible spot in the middle of the high street, one ‘old boy’ had told him that they were running a campaign to relocate him back to Cheltenham. He told the story with relish; he liked the idea of himself as outsider and contrarian. He was a Conservative councillor, but he called himself an unconventional Tory, at odds with the mainstream of the party. UKIP had just won a swathe of council seats in the local elections, and he was pleased with its emergence: not because he agreed with its policies, but because he liked the idea of the British voter saluting the British establishment with ‘two nicotine-stained fingers’.

  It was a typical digression – he talked incessantly, laughing at his own jokes, and pursuing random thoughts before hauling himself back to the story of the flood. ‘This is way off beam,’ he kept saying, though it didn’t stop him when another idea caught his attention. He talked about family, history, politics and religion, but it was his wife who showed me the floodgates that fitted to the front door, and pointed out the Ercol furniture they had chosen for its light wooden frames. Other more substantial adaptations were apparent in the kitchen: the floor had been tiled and the plug sockets were set higher up in the wall, above the point the water reached.

  Tewkesbury has always flooded, for it lies at the junction of the Severn and the Avon, and at the heart of a ‘confusion of small brooks’ and ‘snaking waterways’, in the words of the author John Moore, who was born in a house near Tewkesbury Abbey in 1907. It ‘was isolated even in summer,’ he wrote, and in the winter it was often cut off altogether: ‘milk was delivered by rowing-boat and people punted through the back streets’. Yet, even in a flood-prone town like Tewkesbury, Abbey Terrace was notoriously prone to flooding. When I had been there in November, a woman in the estate agent’s office had tried to convince me that the floods were normal for the time of year. Sure, she said, there are a few car parks and country lanes under water, and a few houses in Abbey Terrace are being pumped out – but that’s only to be expected.