"One nation under water"

Interesting and informative article by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian today on what the architectural response to flooding should be. Read the full article here. Meanwhile, here are the opening paragraphs with some parts highlighted:

"After a weekend of heavy rain, the forecast remains gloomy for the week ahead. The rain will keep on falling in the months and years to come as Britain experiences flooding on an increasingly dramatic scale. By now we all know, or should know, that continuing to build on floodplains is not a very good idea. Unless we begin to design a new generation of buildings on stilts, or learn how to raise land up from the water as the Dutch do, or design new towns along the lines of Venice, then we should abandon all plans to build where waters are likely to rise."

"Will we? Not a chance. In Britain floodplains are cheap land. We want lots of cheap new housing, ever more supermarkets, major roads, distribution depots and heavy traffic to serve the latest low-cost estates. You can see these homes currently marching their way along the flanks of Ely in Norfolk, capital of the water-sodden Fens, and, in particular, along the length of the Thames Gateway, the lands along the Essex and Kent banks of the Thames. We should be very wary indeed of building here."

"Governments want targets for low-cost housing to be met. Regeneration quangos and local authorities go along with this, a dim tide of witless development that would have had Noak knocking up an ark even before God had warned him of the Great Flood to come."

"If we must build on floodplains, then we need to spend huge sums of money on long-term investemnt in either flood defences or new forms of architecture, building, land use and urban planning. We need to invest in major drainage programmes. We need to ensure that the majority of new homes are built well above projected flood levels. Lower down, new houses really do need to be raised on stilts and even provided with boats. We might build a number of small towns set above floodwater moats. We could design modern pumping stations as attractive as the windmills that performed this job in the Fens two and three hundred years ago."

It goes on to say that the East Anglian fens rely on 300 pumping stations and 3,800 miles of artificial channels to keep the water at bay. The article ends:

"Meanwhile, as long as we can sprawl unsustainably across cheap land, we will continue to do so with official as well as commercial blessing. Only a disaster of epic proportions will teach us to plan ahead, as a hard and ever harder rain falls."