by Edward Platt
‘It consumes you completely,’ she said. ‘There is no other life. There’s always something to be done. It’s incredibly stressful.’ She rarely talks about her own experiences, she said, because she doesn’t have the strength to. The last time she had done an interview, three years before she spoke to me, she had burst into tears. Besides, she said, people who had been flooded didn’t want to hear what had happened to her – though, sometimes, it was helpful to prove she had been through it too. Yet she had no doubt that the experience inspired her devotion to the cause. ‘It’s very much why I’m in the National Flood Forum,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it ever really leaves you. I often ask why I do what I do – nobody in their right mind would do it – and I think that’s what drives me.’ She used to be a special-needs teacher before she became involved in the Flood Forum, and she now worked all the time. ‘It’s twenty-four seven. I usually start at seven a.m. and don’t stop till ten at night, and I work weekends regularly. But it has been cathartic for me, helping other people deal with it, and I feel very passionate about it.’
Once she started talking, the stories poured out of her with such fluency and force that the woman whose story I was supposed to be hearing was reduced to the role of listener, like me. Jane Smeaton came from London, but she had moved to the south coast in her early twenties to work in the Portsmouth naval base, where she met her husband. ‘It was a classic case of a temporary job that results in thirty years in the civil service,’ she said. She and her husband moved to Felpham in 1996, though Jane knew the area already, for she used to go to West Sussex on holiday as a child and she had family nearby. They bought their house from her cousin, who had owned it since 1982; they knew it hadn’t flooded since then – though, in the past, the sea had often flooded the streets and fields behind the beach. When she moved to the area, there had been piles of shingle on the beach, which were being used to construct new defences. Yet keeping out the sea was only half the challenge, for the water that collects inland has to drain as well.
There is an outfall pipe at the end of their road, which collects surface water and takes it out to sea, but, in 2009, it broke: the flap at the end that seals it at high tide fell off, and the pipe cracked. Seawater surged into the pipe, spilled out in the street and flooded Jane’s neighbour’s house. Three years later, the equation was reversed: on 12 June 2012, six weeks’ worth of rain fell on Felpham in a day, and the ‘tideflex’ valve that had been fitted to keep out the sea didn’t open enough to let it out. Jane watched the downpour from her bedroom window: ‘I went to bed at eleven o’clock and the rain was torrential: it was hitting the gutter and bouncing out like a waterfall – I was concerned, but it only lasted about twenty minutes, so I went to bed and thought, Fine, that’s all over.’
At two in the morning, the neighbours woke her up to say they had flooded, and the water was coming Jane’s way. She spent the rest of the night trying to bale the water out of her garage with a dustpan and brush. When the builders’ merchant opened at seven a.m., Jane’s husband fetched sandbags. They were keeping it at bay, but only just. The water had backed up in the pipe and overflowed into the drainage ditch that ran down the side of the house. Jane was measuring its rise against the bricks in the wall that enclosed the far side of the ditch.
We went to look at it when we left the pub. It was a shallow, unevenly grassed ditch, lined with rubble: it looked like a path running down the side of the houses, but Heather Shepherd greeted it with a cry of recognition: ‘It’s so typical,’ she said. ‘It looks like it never had water and never will, but when water hits it, it comes up so fast – nothing to overflowing in a matter of minutes.’
At one point, the water stopped rising and went down half a brick. They thought they were okay. ‘Then it just went whoosh, as if someone had pulled a plug upstream,’ Jane said. It was an inch, then two inches, and it still kept rising. Within an hour, there was a foot and a half (almost half a metre) of sewage-tainted water swilling about the ground floor of their house.
~
I had seen for myself the destructive power of seemingly inconspicuous sewers, drains and culverts in the Newcastle suburb of Newburn, which had flooded several times in the course of 2012, once on the night of the Toon Monsoon that struck the north-east on 28 June, two weeks after Jane’s house in Felpham had flooded. Newburn’s floods had begun quietly. In May 2012, a hole six metres deep and four metres wide appeared in a road that ran through a transport depot owned by the Duke of Northumberland’s estate. The culvert that carried a stream called the Winnings beneath the depot had collapsed. The estate rerouted the stream into a steel pipe that ran above ground through the estate, and, for a while, no one was particularly concerned. Yet it was only the beginning of a catastrophic sequence of events whose effects had still not been resolved when I arrived in Newburn on a cold winter’s day in March 2013. A block of flats had been undermined and nearly swept away, its residents had been dispersed across the city and the valley was still sealed within a series of building sites that restored it to a simulacrum of how it must have looked in its industrial heyday. In the meantime, the council and its contractors continued the laborious process of threading the Winnings back into the culvert in order to ensure it wouldn’t flood again.
Culverts are a legacy of rapid urbanization in the Victorian era. When the expanding cities found themselves restricted by natural dips and hollows created by streams and rivers, engineers sank the water into a tunnel and filled in the land. Many are forgotten, though they are never entirely lost. London’s buried rivers ‘still exert an influence upon the world above them,’ Peter Ackroyd writes, in Thames: Sacred River. ‘They can make their presence known in odours and in creeping dampness; the buried Fleet, for example, can still flood basements along its course.’
I once walked the course of the Fleet, from its source on Hampstead Heath to the point where it pours into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge, with a man who had a quixotic plan to restore it to the surface. He checked its course by going into shops and asking if their basement flooded. ‘The lost rivers were once deemed to be responsible for ague and fever, and their valleys (now carved between the streets and buildings of the city) were peculiarly susceptible to mist and fog,’ Ackroyd writes. ‘In more recent times the presence of the underground waters has been blamed for the prevalence of allergies in their vicinity.’
Other sources say the number of psychic incidents and ghost sightings in areas bordering the city’s buried rivers increase after heavy rain, as their secret swollen flows evoke mysterious apparitions. There are physical traces in the names of streets, in the contours of the roads, and in unexpected flowerings, such as the reeds that appear near the railway tracks in Barons Court, close to Counter’s Creek, one of fourteen tributaries of the Thames.
Even when they emerge, they are hard to spot – many of the people who stand beneath the pipe that carries the River Westbourne above the platform of Sloane Square Station will not know what it is. The culvert that carries the Winnings through Newburn is not a secret, for the stream’s upper and lower stretches are above the ground, but its middle section flows beneath the deep weight of rubble and spoil that fill the valley.
Newburn has always been a significant place, for it lies on the most easterly fordable point of the Tyne, but it began to grow rapidly after the Industrial Revolution, when Newcastle became one of the great shipbuilding and engineering centres of the world. In 1822, John Spencer established a steelworks on the upper reaches of the Winnings, and, as it grew to meet local demand, he reshaped the valley in the pragmatic place-making style of the time, sinking the stream into a culvert and filling in the land to build on. ‘Basically, they threw a load of waste material into the valley and put a pipe through it,’ said Mick Murphy, technical director of Newcastle council, when I met him outside the linked sites that cascaded down the hillside, enclosing the many locations where the repairs were underway.
The valley was never particularly beautiful, Mick
Murphy said, but at least it was dry. Yet the fact that the Victorians had made no effort to align the man-made section of the valley with the land upstream created the conditions for the floods that erupted nearly 200 years later.
It started raining heavily in June 2012, and the raised edge of the depot became a wall that held back the water that couldn’t drain through the blocked culvert. The water collected in a pool in the woods, and grew wider and deeper, until it was a brimming lake, poised ominously above the buildings lower down in the valley.
At first, the water spread backwards into the trees, filling the valley and flooding a stable, but then it overtopped the escarpment and poured downhill, flooding houses and forcing the evacuation of two blocks of flats in an estate called Spencer Court. Worse was to follow, two weeks later. Fifty millimetres of rain fell in two hours on the night of 28 June, in the storm that became known as the Toon Monsoon. It was Newcastle’s heaviest storm since the 1940s: 500 properties in the city flooded and thousands of homes lost power. Shopping malls and Metro stations were forced to close. Drivers abandoned their cars, and landslides blocked both main east- and west-coast rail lines. Lightning struck the Tyne Bridge, supplying a vivid televisual demonstration of the power of the storm, and, in Newburn, the pool formed in the woods by the Winnings overflowed again.
Water poured through the depot, sweeping away the ground beneath the block of flats closest to the place the stream emerged from its culvert, leaving the building poised on a few fragile-looking pillars. The water separated into a series of waterfalls and, as the ‘Niagara effect’ worked its way backwards, it ran close to two other blocks of flats and undermined the ground at the sides of the valley, threatening flats and houses that had been built years before Spencer Court. Further down the hill, the rubble-choked water flowed into the mouth of another culvert, which carried the stream beneath the main road. It backed up, flung aside the concrete lids that covered the stream and spread out in a rubble-thickened torrent that reached hundreds of metres along Newburn high street. The downhill flow burst through the doors of a business centre on the other side of the road and knocked down the back wall, taking desks and computers with it as it rejoined the lower reaches of the stream, which wound through the sparsely wooded slopes, towards the Tyne.
When the water went down, the rubble was waist-deep against the shuttered door of the bike shop beside the stream. It took a team of workmen, with three machines and two wagons, two weeks to clear it all away. There was more rain on 26 September, and the pool formed by the Winnings overflowed again. ‘I woke up at quarter to five this morning, and I heard a trembling,’ said a woman who lived in a house in the valley. She couldn’t see anything at first, but when she looked out again, she saw the water pouring towards her. Soon, it was running like a tide through the front door.
I had watched video footage of the water cascading through the grounds of Spencer Court, but it wasn’t until I stood above the pool in the Winnings that I realized how frightening it must have been. A wooden platform had been built across the lip of the man-made dam that contained the lake at the top of the valley, and there was a hut, like a bird hide, above the brick arch that formed the mouth of the culvert. Looking down on it, far below, made me feel dizzy. Yet, looking upstream, at the lake in the woods, did not make me feel much safer. Admittedly, the water was within manageable limits: according to the depth gauge anchored like a giant buoy in the middle, it was three metres deep – though, two days before, it had reached eight. When it reached fifteen metres – five times its current level – it would overtop the lip of the dam, which was the beginning of the man-made section of the valley, and pour downhill through the estate.
Larger pipes had been installed to carry the overflow. They jinked downstream in a giant rusting chain, a steampunk river, taller than I was, out of all proportion to the narrow woodland stream that the Winnings had been. Further down the hill, a shaft that resembled the foundation for a skyscraper had been dug to reach the collapsed section of the culvert.
In November 2012, the pool in the Winnings overflowed again. It was the fifth flood since May, but, by then, the council had built an overflow channel made of concrete blocks, which took the water between buildings, past the spot where Spencer Court used to stand, and let it pour down the side of the valley, which they had clad in ‘rock armour’ – row upon row of dark grey boulders, clamped in place by steel nets. It was a brutally functional piece of landscaping, in keeping with the spirit of the place, and it had worked as expected. It was like a giant water feature, Mick Murphy said, an industrial rockery – and he plainly liked the idea of having created the emblem of the suburban garden on such a scale.
The bill came to more than £12 million, and the Duke of Northumberland had to auction heirlooms from his family homes in Northumberland and Kew to meet the cost. Lots included a painting by Jan Breughel the Elder, called The Garden of Eden, which went for £6 million, and a first-century sculpture of Aphrodite, which went for £10 million. The auction raised £32 million. The estate set aside £10 million to compensate the people in Spencer Court and others that had flooded. Any surplus would be invested in its long-term heritage projects, it said. Yet it saw no return on the £22 million it had spent: three months after the auction, it sold the depot in Newburn for one pound.
The cost was nothing compared to the bill that would follow if one of the bigger culverts in Newcastle were to collapse, Mick Murphy said. The culvert that carries the River Ouseburn through east Newcastle, from Jesmond Dene to the Tyne, was used as a bomb shelter in the war; it was so big that it accommodated a platform above the water, on which thousands of people had slept. If that one went, it would make Newburn look like a vicar’s tea party.
Such disasters are inevitable, Heather Shepherd said, for we live in a crowded country, and our ageing infrastructure can no longer take the strain of the changing climate.
~
Jane Smeaton and her husband had stayed in their flooded house in Felpham for a night. ‘It was horrible; it was cold and smelly, and we could hear the water moving about downstairs. So we decided one night only.’ The water took thirty-six hours to go down: ‘It wasn’t sudden – it didn’t whoosh away. The area was tidal locked; the flap put in to stop the sea coming up was stopping the water going out, so surface water that would normally feed out to the sea was locked in situ – nothing could go out.’ Once she had the cats – there were nine of them – and she knew she and her husband were safe, she felt calm: ‘I thought, well, it could have been worse.’ It wasn’t until the water went down that she recognized the extent of the damage. There was black-grey slime over everything, and anything that could absorb the water was ruined. The kitchen lino was buckled and wavy. The hardwood floors were ruined. The kitchen cupboards were swollen. The carpets were gone and the water had been soaked up into the walls from underneath, so the whole of the house, up to a metre’s height, was drenched.
The cost came to £100,000, and at first they weren’t sure that the insurance company would pay. ‘It turned out there was a clause in our contract which said we weren’t covered if we were within 200 metres of a whole list of watery things – streams, watercourses, tidal, anything you can think of that has water in it – and we’d said no, because we thought we weren’t.’ The insurance company sent a man to look at the property and assess their claim. ‘And, I’m not kidding, he got a tape measure out to measure the distance from the back wall of the house to the high-tide mark.’ It was 120 metres. For six weeks, they didn’t know if the insurance company would accept liability or not – though, they did, for the house hadn’t been flooded by the sea.
A neighbour let them stay in his holiday home initially, and then they moved into a caravan, which they parked in the drive, so they could be closer to the house, partly to protect it from the people driving round in white vans. When I visited, they were still living in the caravan, although they had moved back into the pebble-dashed house to sleep. The washing machine had been plum
bed into the hall, guarding the entrance to a series of stripped and empty rooms, given over to the cats. There was one cat sleeping by the fireplace in the sitting room that overlooked the garden, and another scampered through the kitchen as we went in. There were paw prints in a strip of freshly laid concrete, and piles of cat food and cat litter in the old kitchen. It smelt of cats, though Heather dismissed Jane’s embarrassment by saying it added to the ‘flavour’ of the flooded house. The tang made the sea air outside seem even cleaner.
We walked down to the beach to see the pipe that had blocked. It was larger than I expected – a solid steel tube, like the ones that had been threaded through the building sites at Newburn, which ran a hundred metres down the beach to a point below the high tide. Water trickled from its mouth. There were two pumps in the side of the concrete bunker behind the promenade, so, if the pipe became tide-locked again, they could pump the water over the promenade and straight into the sea.
~
The tide was out, but the sand between the groynes was glossed with streaks of water that gleamed in the evening sun. The poet William Blake had lived in Felpham in his only extended spell outside London, in a house between the Fox Inn, where I had met Jane and Heather, and the beach. He had never been to the sea before, and he relished living so close to it, according to his biographer, Peter Ackroyd.
