Living Flood Histories 

Arts and Humanities Research Council Researching Environmental Change Network

Learning to Live with Water: Flood histories, Environmental Change, Remembrance and Resilience

This network project is funded by the Art and Humanities Research Council

Flood levels, Worcester
Beside the entrance to the Watergate to College Green by Worcester Cathedral some of the flood levels have been marked on the wall. The July 2007 flood level has recently been added (top right) this puts the flood in context with other high floods of the past, the highest in living memory was the flood of March 1947, the mark for this flood on the extreme left and is around one foot higher than the 2007 flood. The larger plaque at the top marks the highest known flood of 1770.
© Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT

Recent extreme floods in the UK and beyond (e.g. Gloucestershire 2007; Cumbria, 2009 (UK); Hurricane Katrina (US)) have brought community resilience to flood events and future flood risk high onto research and political agendas. There have been, however, extreme floods in the past, and there is considerable historical evidence about the nature of these floods, and how communities remembered/ materialised these events (e.g. in flood marks and narratives), protected themselves, and thus built memories and experiences into their community resilience. Memories and stories of past flood events, then, might help future community resilience.

The are three developments relating to this basic process of memories of flooding which we wish to explore. Firstly There is some anecdotal evidence that traditional flood coping strategies have been lost in some communities as their nature has changed (e.g. transient communities in urban areas).  Secondly  there is also evidence that, in other cases, recent floods are being experienced, recorded, remembered and built into at least some community narratives in new ways, for example, through the use of mobile ICT, social networking sites and other digital resources (e.g. Flood Archives using YouTube videos). Thirdly some communities are new, or are new to the experience of flooding, and thus no memories are available to them.

The stories, or narratives that communities and individuals construct around past flood events and future flood risk are important, changing, and, we feel, have a potential role to play in community resilience. These stories are, or can be closely linked to individual and community identities in terms of ‘coping with unruly water’ and bound up with senses of place. In some instances artists, theatre groups, community groups are working with affected communities in ways which touch upon recovery, therapy, practical preparedness and so on (see for example,  Hull Truck Company after the 2007 floods, UK).  This suggests strong potential for arts and humanities approaches to issues and practices of memory, narrative, flood history and heritage, and community resilience which would work alongside and be facilitated by the natural/social sciences and policy governance discourses in order to deepen our understanding of, and preparedness for, future flood risk.

This project has been set up to explore this potential through a research network which will bring together a range of academic scholars, artists (of various types) communities leaders/activists working in the broad area of living with flooding past, present and future.  Key areas for exploration are around understandings of regularly flooded landscapes and those which have suffered past flooding episodically and more regularly now with changing climate.  Extreme flood events can generate extreme responses that in themselves can act as communal resources for social learning/sustainable memory.  In contrast, our experience of more routinely wet landscapes focuses more on the subtleties/nuances of the everyday experience and interaction with ‘water’ in landscape. It is our belief, however, that both, and their interactions, demand attention.

This project will consist of a network that seeks to engage with ‘watery’ (wet, flood prone) landscapes and those with episodic incursions of wet onto dry. The perspectives will contrast the everyday experiences of living with water (continuous, expected) and the extreme (transformational, unexpected), and on the active interaction between academic and ‘watery’ actants.