At the end of Flood Action Week, Professor Stewart Mottram turns to literature and history as he reflects on the controversy surrounding the latest flood alleviation scheme for the River Thames.
The latest flood alleviation scheme for the River Thames is attracting considerable controversy from wild swimmers at Ferris Meadow Lake in Surrey. Ferris Meadow is a former gravel pit turned conservation area that is now a popular wild swimming destination, attracting more than 30,000 swimmers a year. It is also part of the proposed route for the River Thames Scheme, an ambitious project to dig a new ‘bypass’ channel for the River Thames connecting a series of existing lakes in the nearby area, including Ferris Meadow.
The Environment Agency points out that around 11,000 homes and 1,600 businesses sited on the Surrey floodplains stand to benefit from the scheme, which will reduce risks of flooding on the main River Thames by diverting water through the channel at times of heavy rain. The lake’s owner, Emma Pattinson, however, argues that the channel will also carry sewage and other pollutants harmful to swimmers and wildlife into the lake along with the floodwaters.
The website for the River Thames Scheme notes the recent history of severe flooding on this stretch of the Thames as justification for the proposed new channel. The site also points to additional benefits, arguing that the channel will improve biodiversity and recreational access to green spaces in the areas through which the new channel will run. The scheme, in this sense, can be seen as a ‘Nature-Based Solution’ to flood alleviation – one that works with nature 'to reduce flood risk while simultaneously securing substantial environmental benefits' for both human and non-human communities (Opperman and Galloway 2022). For Surrey swimmers, however, these ‘substantial environmental benefits’ sit uneasily with the scheme’s plans for Ferris Meadow – plans that threaten to ‘disrupt the delicate ecosystems’ at Ferris Meadow and potentially to destroy a popular recreational swimming site.
The Ferris Meadow swimmers may disagree on the precise course of the proposed Thames Flood Scheme channel, but few dispute the basic need for further flood alleviation on this stretch of the Thames. The River Thames Scheme was still in its infancy when the Thames burst its banks in early 2014, flooding around 1,000 Surrey homes and prompting residents in the Surrey town of Sunbury-on-Thames to accuse the Environment Agency of not doing enough to alleviate flood risk on the river. Memories of the 2014 floods helped accelerate plans for the River Thames Scheme, which received financial backing from the UK Government in 2021, and with ‘the estimated economic impact of a major flood ... currently around £1 billion’, the £500m price-tag for the Thames Flood Scheme will be more than offset by the number of flood disasters it helps reduce.
For a flood to be deemed ‘disastrous’ it must directly affect human society, so it stands to reason that the more we build on floodplains, the more we need to rely on sophisticated flood alleviation schemes to reduce the risk of flood disasters for the humans who live there. Many flood alleviation schemes in the UK and overseas now recognise the value of a ‘room for the river’ approach that conserves or reintroduces green-blue space (for example, meadows) on floodplains, and allows rivers in flood to break their banks and spill onto this undeveloped ground (Opperman and Galloway 2022).
The more room we give for rivers on floodplains, the more this will help reduce flood levels, and therefore levels of flood risk, in urban areas downstream. A flood alleviation scheme for the City of York, for example, makes deliberate use of the floodplain meadows at Clifton and Rawcliffe Ings, located upstream of York on the banks of the River Ouse. These meadows can store millions of cubic metres of floodwater and help alleviate flooding downstream in York city centre (Rothero, Lake, and Gowing 2016).
But floodplain meadows provide other benefits beyond their usefulness as temporary storage for floodwater. The floodwater that flows onto meadow ground also contains nutrients that are a natural fertiliser for meadow flowers and grasses, and the water also transports silt and sand (alluvium) onto the meadows that over centuries form sediments of quick-draining alluvial soil, ideal for growing grass to make hay. Far from being an inconvenience, or disaster, therefore, the seasonal flooding of the meadows that grew up along riverbanks from early medieval times in England and Wales was in fact highly beneficial for hay crops. In his agrarian manual, The Boke of Surveying and Improvements (1524), for example, John Fitzherbert recommends deliberately flooding meadows in the autumn and winter, 'from the tyme that they be mowen vnto the begynning of May', in order to improve the fertility of the meadow soil.
Some of the River Thames floodplain at Surrey is still managed as meadow today. Runnymede, for example, site of the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, is an ancient mede, or meadow, directly upstream of the route proposed for one of the Thames Flood Scheme's new channels (the 'Runnymede Channel Section'), and hay is still harvested from Long Mede to the north of Runnymede itself. Other, more urban locations on the Thames river banks retain only traces of their own history as floodplain meadows: the Lammas Recreation Park in Staines-on-Thames, for example, takes its name from the medieval Lammas meadows system, so-called because these were meadows that allowed sheep and cattle to graze – between Lammas Day (1 August) and Candlemas (1 February) – on what remained of the grass after the midsummer hay harvest. Despite renewed interest in Nature-Based Solutions to flood alleviation, floodplain meadows declined sharply in the 20th Century and are today 'one of the rarest lowland/grassland types in the UK' (Rothero, Lake, and Gowing 2016: 20). Downstream of Runnymede, at Egham Hythe, is Thorpe Hay Meadow: once part of a thriving medieval economy of haymaking on floodplains, it is now the ‘last surviving example of unimproved grassland on Thames Gravel in Surrey’.
Writing of Runnymede and the River Thames in his 1642 poem, Coopers Hill, John Denham uses the metaphor of the Thames in flood to warn parliament, on the eve of the First English Civil War (1642-7), about the dangers of bridling the powers of kings. A king constrained by parliament, he writes, is like 'a Calme river rais'd with suddaine raines | Or snowes dissolv'd' (lines 319-20). The more people try to constrain a river in flood, Denham argues, the more the river (like the king) will fight back: 'Stronger & feircer by restraint he roares | And knowes noe bounds, but makes his power his shores’ (lines 327-8). Coopers Hill is a product of the seventeenth century and civil war, but in its reference to rivers in flood, it is also a poem shaped by the landscape of the Thames floodplain it describes, and by the cycles of seasonal flooding on the meadows of Runnymede. Denham's metaphor of the king as a river in flood works because his readers in the mid-seventeenth century would still have understood the wisdom of ‘making room for the river’ by retaining floodplain meadows on riverbanks. This is wisdom we are only now rediscovering in the 21st Century, as we seek to tackle rising flood risks in areas of high-density housing. The Thames floodplain looks very different today to how it did in Denham’s lifetime. But the river that runs through it still threatens in times of flood to rise up, to break its banks, and to ‘know no bounds’.
Stewart Mottram is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Hull and Project Lead for the Arts and Humanities Research Council project, ‘From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities’ (AH/Y004779/1).