General Chat

In this cul de sac the builders forgot to allow for footpaths in front of the houses with proper gardens. O.h. and neighbour have grassed area outside their houses but it's not fenced off, it is rarely used as a path tho as people walk in the road, as they have to on either side of the roadway to the main close. Luckily the cul de sac is never very busy with traffic or it would be so dangerous.

There are groups acting against the current plans for the field and there have been representation about the water levels etc. Hopefully the latest weather problems will reinforce the argument that it's not a place for housing.

Lizx

When we look at the estate my MIL lives on, built 1980s it is blatantly obvious that they squeezed two more houses on the road she lives on, it is impossible to have a car parked in front of it and have room to put dustbins on the edge of the property AND no one can walk past with a pushchair and not go in the road on dustbin day, all so builders can make as much money as they can cos they are greedy, you don't see many poor builders. Rant over.

Most new houses and roads have surface water drains leading into rivers when a soakaway or catch pond would slow the release down and prevent flash floods.

There is a very good and detailed late 18c map of Sussex (Yeakell and Gardner).It is pre-enclosure and shows areas of waste which are continuations of Pagham Harbour.

Most of these areas have water lying on them at times of heavy rain and especially when there are high spring tides as well.

Water goes where it always went.

If people are daft enough to buy builders spec houses built on flood plains, millionaire mansions beside the Thames or quaint characterful cottages and pubs near the Severn, Trent, Somerset levels, the middle of York and so on THEN it is difficult to feel a shred of sympathy.

Anywhere that has flooded in the past will flood again. Eroded cliffs that have collapsed in the past will do so again.

I really don't see why everyone else should fork out taxes and inflated insurance premiums to compensate. When such developments and property become uninsurable and thus unmortgagable there will be a change. Not before.

The UK needs to bite the bullet and realise that there is not enough land for the millions of ticky tack boxes as it is still less even more. As in other countries e.g. France there needs to be a massive shift towards low rise blocks of flats ( 3-7 stories ) with commercial premises on the ground floor and underground parking.

Exactly you can't beat nature! Not rocket science is it :-)

For those who are fighting planning permission for building on soggy ground - it sounds as if a series of current photos of the conditions might help to sway the Planning committee.

When houses with large gardens were the norm, say 1930s-1950's it might not have been quite such a problem. Now-a-days new-builds have much smaller ones and are far closer together. The water has to go somewhere!

Liz, that sounds quite like where we are, builders are fighting to get planning permission to build houses and a massive shopping centre on what was a farm and we are in a very small village! :-|

There is talk of houses being built on the field at the end of the garden here. This whole estate of housing was built on fields in the 1970s. The water table in the back garden is high, sometimes water comes up between the paving on the small patio when it's really wet and the lawn at the mo is like a bog. Sometimes if the drain outside is blocked the water floods up to the step outside the front door (no front gardens, just a couple of yards of grass to the kerb. All along the road which has closes and cul de sacs off it, are flooded areas with large puddles at the slightest bit of rain. The field has big puddles in it, so what will happen to all the water if houses are built there? It has to go somewhere. There are no rivers close by.

Time the planners got real, they are saying there is such a need for housing that it has to be built on these places, but I wouldn't want a house there.

Lizx

Went out and about yesterday and some places looked like they had always been ponds or lakes, in fact they were fields a few days ago :-(

I tend to agree that the building on land only causes problems,

where rain fell on land and was soaked up, now falls on massive sheds the size of small villages..and where does this roof borne water go? down a drainpipe, into a sewer and then into a river...........lakes and ponds are filled in, flood plains are built upon, patios are paved and where does THIS surface water go? down the drain, into a river.....

think of a city ,the size of say Los Angeles for one, hundreds of square miles of ..... a concrete surface............no wonder they need drains wider than motorways.........

I have seen industrial estates built on marshland so built that there is a "wild life pond" where people sit at picnic tables in summer admire the view and have their lunch, different story in winter though when the car park floods.
Hmmmmm can't beat nature then. :-(

I think quite a lot could have been avoided. Gone are the men travelling around the place clearing ditches AND clearing tree/shrub growth from road signs.
I also wonder how many planning departments actually have a geologist on board. They build housing estates on high ground, and wonder why the valley, dry for hundreds of years (as is evident by the very old cottages), now floods!! Logic tells me the concreting of land leads to a lack of natural drainage.
They also seem to not understand the meaning of the phrase 'Flood Plain' or 'Water Meadow'. There was a REASON our ancestors didn't build on them.

:-|

I have lived in this house for fifty years this month and only moved from down the road.

when we moved in there was a swampy bit across the road which had been a pond but was very rapidly silting. Now it is just an overgrown ditch with a bit of ground between it and the road.

There were ditched along one side or other of this road for most of it's length.

The stream down the road flowed through two arches under the road and the only time I can remember it filling up was in a time of truly exceptional rain and tide at some time before I moved here and that was before there were things done at the harbour to keep the tide back.



That rife is now less than three feet wide and there are willows growing in it. It overflows further up the road. The other end of my road floods to a point where it is impassable and the water lies deep across the road to me.

The river board was always in evidence, men in the water courses with prongs and fag hooks. I have not seen that for years, probably since the Environment Agency took charge.

I wonder how preventable all this flooding might have been because what could be more important than land drainage? It seems to have been completely abandoned.