by Edward Platt
He strung up a belay and sent a cup of tea to a neighbour without spilling it, though he knew that such minor triumphs would make little difference if the houses collapsed. ‘It would only have taken a couple of courses of bricks to go, and whole streets would have been swept away.’ Cars were found stranded in some of the yards; the current had picked them up, flipped them on their side and forced them through the gaps at the end of the alleys. He finally left his house the next day, when the water had started going down, and all he took with him was a piece of parmesan – emblem of his sophisticated tastes, and of the curious decisions that people say they make when they find their lives overturned by a flood. The water was still knee-deep and fast flowing; it had shattered windows and flooded shops. Coloured yarn had streamed out of one, snagging on obstacles in the current.
He came back a day later and climbed into the house through an upstairs window. ‘It was emotional,’ he said. ‘I work from here – so, potentially, I had lost everything. I remember standing in here and thinking, What do I do? Where do I start? You’ve got to make a start somewhere, because it’s the drying-out period that delays everything. So I stripped the plaster. It was good to do that – it was taking control.’
The council asked him to survey buildings, which meant breaking in, for people weren’t allowed back into their homes for several days. But he didn’t expect to have such a prominent role in the regeneration of the town. Traumatic though it was, he knew the flood was an opportunity to make improvements. Cockermouth depended on its shops, and if they were lost, it would die. He also knew they didn’t have to put them back exactly as they had been before; they could make them better. ‘Nature had bitten me, and I wanted to bite it right back.’
He went to a meeting and said, ‘If we are going to restore it all, we should think about how we do it.’ He expected to get shouted at. Instead, he got applause. He became the chair of the regeneration society and started producing sketches of how the high street might look. David Cameron, the Old Etonian Prime Minister, alumnus of the school Henry VIII established in the meadow opposite Windsor Castle, got in touch, because they were the ‘big society’ in action, and Prince Charles came as well, for he loved Cockermouth’s Georgian high street. The conservation officer showed him Darren’s sketches, and he liked them so much, he ‘pulled strings’ and they got the money to improve the shopfronts.
Darren did most of the work for free, but he got a lot of publicity out of it, and won awards. It was ironic that a modernist should be recognized for renovating Georgian shopfronts, he said, but it didn’t matter; he was born in Hull and trained in Liverpool, but he had lived in Cockermouth for fourteen years, and it was his town. ‘I don’t want to walk down a street I am going to be pissed off with. I want a quality town – Georgian, Victorian, modernist, whatever it is. I want thoughtful, considered design.’ Prince Charles wanted to be involved, but he couldn’t be, publicly, so he appointed a friend, who ‘banged heads together’ and speeded up the process. ‘Until then, I would have said it’s ridiculous, this networking – but, by God, it works. If there was a logjam building up, we would have a word with Prince Charles’s private secretary and, the next morning, it would be gone.’
He wasn’t alone in praising members of the royal family. Unlike politicians, who were invariably greeted with contempt and hostility, the royals were always welcome in flooded towns or villages. People found their presence reassuring and valued the practical help they could provide. Yet even Prince Charles couldn’t stop Cockermouth flooding again in 2015. He might have retained the ability to pull strings and call in favours, but he didn’t control the budget for flood defences or decide where they should go. That power had shifted downstream from the royal territories on the western reaches of the Thames – from Windsor, Hampton Court and Richmond Park, where King Henry VIII was said to have stood on a mound to await the signal from the Tower that Anne Boleyn had been executed – to one of the places where King Canute is supposed to have conducted his experiment in holding back the tide.
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Thorney Island used to be one of the bars of sand and gravel that stretched across the Thames, and, until relatively recently, it was still depicted as an island. There is a drawing, dated to 1537, which shows it on the north bank of the Thames, as it is today, but separated from the rest of London by the embanked River Tyburn, which runs around it on three sides. Half a dozen bridges join it to the rest of the city.
The island emerged between about 6,500 and 5,000 years ago, writes Robert Shepherd, in Westminster: A Biography, when ‘the Thames was wider and shallower than today’s embanked river, with gravel and sand bars dotted across its clay-covered flood plain.’ The site was ‘marsh within marsh and forest within forest,’ said Arthur Stanley, a Dean of Westminster in the nineteenth century, but it ‘presented several points of attraction’ – including ‘close supplies of timber for building and fuel; reeds and rushes for thatch and fodder, and meat from wildlife in the nearby marshes’; 3,500 years ago, the land was farmed and partly cleared; 2,500 years ago, an alder wood platform and post were installed on a site in Richmond Terrace – the oldest structure found so far. ‘Celtic items discovered in the Thames near Westminster, including a bronze parade helmet by Waterloo bridge and a shield at Battersea suggest offerings were being made to the gods . . . about 2,000 years ago, by which time a rise in the river levels had submerged the sites of the Underground station, Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament.’
In Roman times, the river was twice the width it is today, and shallower. Peter Ackroyd describes how it ‘wove in coils, its broad curves moving through a marshy riverine landscape . . . The river was replenished by many tributary streams and rivers that have long since disappeared or vanished underground. At low tide it moved slowly through banks of clean gravel and sand. Downriver from Westminster, dotted among the waters, there were numerous islands that were submerged at high tide.’
The traders who lived in a hall on Treasury Green, near Downing Street, in the eighth century may have founded the first church on Thorney, and since it was to the west of the town then known as Lundenwic, it was called ‘WestMinster’.
Canute, the Danish conqueror of England who became king in 1017, chose it for his capital because it was removed from the busy settlement to the east. His palace supposedly stood in Parliament Square, though no one knows where he set his throne on the foreshore as the tide came in, during his famous attempt to establish the limits of kingly power. Some sources claim he was trying to show that man was powerless in the face of nature, though the inscription on the statue of Canute’s chair that used to stand on the seafront at New Brighton, on the Wirral, endorsed the popular idea of the hubristic king who believed he could hold back the tides: ‘Sea come not hither nor wet the sole of my foot,’ the inscription said.
The statue was vandalized in the 1950s and it had been removed. I went to look for it one day, but I couldn’t find anyone who remembered it, and I might have doubted it existed, if New Brighton wasn’t such a perfect place for Canute’s experiment. The Wirral claims to be the only place in Britain with documented proof of Viking occupation, and Robert Duck says it has ‘long been a microcosm of this shrinking land’, for the waters beyond the peninsula, between the mouths of the Mersey and the Dee, conceal another drowned forest called Dove Point and the three islets of Hilbre Island, which used to be part of the mainland. During the reign of Elizabeth I, 4,000 foot and 200 horse troops camped on Hilbre on their way to Ireland, where the Earl of Essex was fighting a campaign. Even in the seventeenth century, it was a single island, a mile long, with a deep inlet on its south-west side, but it has now been reduced to three weathered, wind-sculpted reefs, joined by tendrils of sandstone that are exposed at low tide. As usual, the process has not been entirely one-sided; land has been gained further down the Dee Estuary, as its waters have silted up, and its ports have moved progressively closer to the Irish Sea. Today, only the highest of tides reaches Parkgate, the former
port that had replaced Neston as the port for Chester, and, on the night of the Great Tide of 2013, people in the pubs and cafes on the front were startled to see rats swarming out of the marshes, as they fled the sea’s advance.
New Brighton flooded as well; I had watched footage of the waves breaking through the old marine lake and surging through the tower blocks and shopping centre. Yet Westminster was also prone to flooding. In 1236, the water rose so high that people punted through Westminster Hall in boats, or ‘rode through it on horseback to their chambers.’ The construction of the Embankment fortified and extended Westminster, yet it couldn’t protect it entirely. In 1928, as melting snows in the Cotswolds swelled the Thames, a wall collapsed near Lambeth Bridge, and water poured into the lower galleries of the Tate. Fourteen people drowned.
Given the way the island had disappeared, absorbed into the fabric of the city, it seems appropriate that the street that bears its name lies beyond its borders. Thorney Street runs behind the Embankment from Millbank Tower, and emerges on Horseferry Road, opposite Ergon House, the home of the Environment Agency. It is an unusually quiet street; there are no shops or cafes until you reach the far corner, and no street furniture, either – there is no need for parking bays or signs, for there are no parked cars. The emptiness is explained by the massive stone building that occupies the northern side of the street. The signs saying ‘Threat level heightened’ inside the numbered doorways are one clue to its purpose. The spiked strips or stingers on the ramps leading down into the basement car parks, the darkened windows and the surveillance cameras are others. They make the nature of Thames House, and the identity of its tenant, seem very plain – though, even if you don’t know it was the home of MI5, you might guess it by the shadow it casts across Thorney Street.
I had paused outside the Environment Agency, but I hadn’t tried to go in. There was no point; I had tried approaching it several times, and, each time, I had been dismissed. Even personal introductions failed. A friend of mine lived next door to a senior official who had apparently spent the winter of the floods ‘pacing the incident room like Dr Strangelove’. The official was responsive at first, but said he had to consult colleagues before he could meet me. The conversation went no further; he couldn’t talk to me at all, not even socially or off the record. I got the same reaction from other people I was introduced to: at first, they responded to my interest in their working lives, but none of them would meet me, and they soon stopped answering my emails.
I wasn’t surprised that the Environment Agency had become so defensive. When the floods were at their height in Somerset, the Communities’ Secretary Eric Pickles had said on national television that he was sorry the government had listened to the advice of the ‘so-called experts’ who had told them not to dredge the rivers. It seemed a cowardly betrayal, couched in knowingly provocative language, and it made me feel sorry for the few employees of the Environment Agency I had been allowed to meet, who seemed conscientious and hard-working. I had no reason to doubt their honesty or the quality of their advice, and yet, when I saw the location of their offices, opposite the MI5 building, at the heart of the unaccountable power of the state, I wondered why I had been so prepared to make excuses for them. Perhaps I was getting old and complacent, or perhaps it was a consequence of living in London for so long: I had become so accustomed to the view from the centre that I had forgotten the purpose of my trips, which was to try to capture life in the marginal places that were prone to flood. I should have been more prepared to take the stories I’d heard on trust. I had underestimated people’s legitimate complaints and fears. Perhaps the Environment Agency was as remote and arrogant as they said. Perhaps it had been negligent and incompetent in failing to prevent the floods – or, worse, contributed to causing them. Even the idea that it had acted maliciously did not seem far-fetched as I stood outside its offices. Yet I only came across one recorded instance of someone opening a floodgate and inundating a village, and the culprit was not an Environment Agency official, but a resident of the Somerset Levels – and the place he flooded was Thorney.
11: Isle of Thorns
THE ANCHORAGE DRAINED: MOORLAND & THORNEY, JULY 2014
The Anchorage had been a post office as well as a pontoon in the flood. ‘All day, there were people coming in and out, knocking on the door and getting the dogs going – it was never-ending,’ said its owner, Rita Dobson. ‘We got to know quite a lot of people. It was a nice distraction, in a way – I had other people to talk to, and shoulders to cry on when I was having a low day. On the other hand, you have people come along in their waders and on family outings to see the flooding, taking photographs through the windows. One man came along with a box of chocolates to give to the people of Thorney. And I said, “Well, you know what you can do with those chocolates.”’
One day, a group of bikers rolled into town and drew up on the water’s edge. Rita went out and asked them what they were doing. ‘They said they do this trip every year. And I said, “Don’t you watch the news? Half of Somerset is under bloody water. Piss off, before I do some damage.”’ The response from everybody in the country – from local school kids putting food bags together to people making donations – was sweet and kind, she said, though not necessarily very helpful. After the water had gone, eight imams from South Yorkshire turned up with a cheque for the church relief fund. One of her neighbours asked if she would mind having a chat with them, and eight of them came to the door with a film crew. She laughed. ‘So we took them round the house, where we had all the drying equipment, showed them the road where the water had come in. They were lovely. They didn’t need to do that.’
Seven months had passed since I had first gone to Thorney, and the road from Langport to Muchelney, which I had tried walking down in the floods in January, was clear. It was a hot day, but the road across the moor ran through a cool green tunnel that retained an intimation of the water that had subsided. Tall reeds marked the lines of the rhynes and drains in the surrounding fields. Muchelney was closer than I expected; I reached it in five minutes. Thorney was less than two miles further on. I passed the path behind the village that I had walked along in the dark, and crossed the bridge into Thorney, where the water had begun.
Its absence had shrunk the village: in the car, in the bright summer sunshine, the distance from the Wards’ house to the Anchorage seemed much less than it had when I had done the same short journey in Glen’s canoe. I parked beside the cottages by the path to Thorney Mill, where I had parked on the evening of the flood, and walked back to the point in the road where the canoes had been beached. Evidence of the clean-up was everywhere: there were portable toilets, cement mixers and skips in the gardens of the houses, and sandbags stacked outside the thatched house that used to be the pub. Its walls were propped up with posts, and there was talk that it might have to be demolished.
Yet, if the buildings had suffered, then the gardens hadn’t. The trees and shrubs had emerged unharmed from their drenching in the polluted water. Roses and climbing plants obscured the windows and front doors of the houses, and there were runner beans, broad beans and tomatoes in one garden. Even the sign on the front of the Anchorage, which had seemed so improbably prominent on the evening of the flood, had faded into the resurgent foliage.
I met Rita Dobson on the path beside the river, where the Parrett Internal Drainage Board was building a bank to divide Thorney from Westmoor, from where the winter flood had come, and we walked back to the Anchorage and sat at a wooden table in the garden. There were flowers in a wheelbarrow and garden furniture on a raised patio. Two steps led up to the bank that overlooked the river, which was far below the top, shallow and slow moving. It had nearly reached the top in the winter, Rita said, for it was so silted up, it wasn’t flowing as it should have, but the water that got inside her house had come from elsewhere.
In 2012, the road had flooded, and they couldn’t get to Muchelney, but the water stopped short of their house. This year, it had come inside on 6 Janua
ry, a day after it flooded the Wards, because of the way it flowed. ‘The water table was so high, it pushed up the pond liner and spilled more water in the garden, thanks very much, as if we didn’t have enough already,’ she said. When it breached the flagstone floor, they gave up trying to stop it. ‘Somebody said this to me – and I didn’t believe it until it happened – but it’s almost a relief when the water’s in, because you can stop worrying. It’s in, and then you can deal with it. You thought, “Oh, well – that’s that.”’
There was still a skip in the yard, but most of the work was done. The house had new stone floors and a sleek fitted kitchen. The ‘last fiddly bits and bobs’ were the worst part, Rita said, but she did not want to complain; there were people in Moorland who weren’t finished, seven months on, and people who had flooded the year before and hadn’t even moved back in before they had been flooded again. ‘I feel really bad for those who had it worse than me,’ Rita said. ‘All I could think was that it happened here and it’s only so deep and it’s bad enough. You know, I’ve got a brand-new downstairs, which I wouldn’t have had. But I’d rather not have gone through that and got my house back as it was.’
She came from Croydon, like Glen Ward, her neighbour in Thorney, though she grew up on the Holloway Road, near where I live, in North London. She moved to Thorney because she wanted to escape the rat race. The flood hadn’t made her love the house or the area any less, but she wished the people responsible for maintaining the rivers had been doing what they were supposed to do. ‘If it’s a natural phenomenon, if it’s Mother Nature doing what she does, then fine,’ she said. ‘But if it’s because they couldn’t be bothered to spend the money to maintain the waterways, then I don’t think it’s acceptable. They have neglected their duties and that’s why people are so cross. Some people will tell you that we didn’t have much more water than normal that month. But we had a wet summer, so the land was already wet, and it will only hold so much. Of course, the weather was part of the problem. I don’t think it was all the problem.’