The Great Flood: Travels Through a Sodden Landscape
A BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’
Flooding has always threatened the rainy, wind-swept islands of the United Kingdom, but it is becoming more frequent and more severe. Combining travel writing and reportage with readings of history, literature and myth, Edward Platt explores the way floods have shaped the physical landscape of Britain and left their mark on its inhabitants.
During the course of two years, which coincided with the record-breaking floods of the winter of 2013–14, Platt travelled around the country, visiting places that had flooded and meeting the people affected.
He visited flooded villages and towns and expanses of marsh and Fen threatened by the winter storms, and travelled along the edge of the drowned plain that used to connect Britain to continental Europe.
He met people struggling to stop their houses falling into the sea and others whose homes had been engulfed. He investigated disasters natural and man-made, and heard about the conflicting attitudes towards those charged with preventing them.
The Great Flood dramatizes the experience of being flooded and considers what will happen as the planet warms and the waters rise, illuminating the reality behind the statistics and headlines that we all too often ignore.
“[An] engrossing account of floods ancient and modern”Sunday Times
“How we visualise climate catastrophe tends toward the epic, the exotic . . . Platt instead locates its effects in the everyday: the flooding experienced by England’s picture postcard towns and occasionally decrepit coastal settlements. He shows how these places are turned upside down by torrents of raging water, as rivers, streams and culverts strain and break under the pressure of extreme rainfall, or sea walls and floodgates give way … The Great Flood makes the global local in the same way that the climate emergency does . . .Platt’s writing combines sharp reportage with a poet’s eye for a striking image that vividly captures the otherworldly, waterlogged landscapes he travels through”Karl Whitney, TheGuardian
“Platt frequently draws on literature, whether William Blake, J. G. Ballard, Carol Ann Duffy, Rebecca Solnit or the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the book’s main focus is local: Platt covers ground on foot in the aftermath of deluges, around the tributaries of England and Wales, from the Severn to the Thames valley, from the Tyne to the Tone. He talks to people who live on flood plains, next to treacherous waterways or in “the upside-down world of the Fens”. He encounters parishioners in Somerset praying for the floods to abate….
Sympathetic to the unromantic, everyday nature of suffering, Platt also has an eye for the absurd… Striking environmental facts are relayed through equally striking stories… “Darran Anderson, TLS
“This is a book about inundation and immersion, notions that have swirled in the human psyche for millennia . . . Hardly any corner of the land has been unaffected by flood, as chapters taking in everywhere from Fenland to the Lake District, Humberside to Wales, Gloucestershire to North- umbria, show. But despite the exhaustive and extensive travelogue, somehow this is always a book about Middle England, not just in terms of latitude and longitude but in a more abstract, inchoate and mysterious way; an England of quiet individual tragedy and its bedfellow, eccentric local heroism . . . There are a great many personal accounts . . . the effect is cumulatively melancholy, incantatory even”Stuart Maconie, New Statesman
“[The Great Flood] is deeply provincial and yet gesturing to something wider — how even countries with traditionally temperate climates, such as Britain, will need to learn how to adapt to a warming world.”Emma Hogan, The Times
“An absorbing blend of travel writing, report-age and inter- views [from] the prize-winning author of Leadville . . . a very timely picture of how water shapes both our landscapes and our sense of who we are.”Caroline Sanderson, Bookseller
“Platt is both keen observer, sympathetic listener, eager apprentice and shrewd commentator, with a weather eye on the future and a deep understanding of the past.” Ebenezer Presents
“A thoughtful, non-judgemental account of the increasing vulnerability of many parts of Britain to flooding from a subtle, self-effacing chronicler . . . The Great Flood should convince readers to appreciate the trauma that results when people lose their homes and precious possessions overnight.” Ken Worpole, Caught By The River
“Platt writes in a densely journalistic style, with such an impressive range of references . . . The real power of the book is its insight into the psychological burden of flooding, both during the crisis and in the long road to normality afterwards”Church Times
“In The Great Flood, Platt investigates a different kind of marooning, voyaging about Britain to the scenes of the biggest floods of recent years. He stands in smelly, soggy sitting rooms and canoes up high streets on which ducks are swimming. Against these recent deluges, he sets the vaster pattern (wide reading lightly worn) of the great floods of human history, and their place in the collective memory. There are reflections on Doggerland, that huge alluvial plain, larger than the current British Isles, that once stretched where the North Sea is now. Hunter-gatherers roamed there until, in 6, 200 BC, it was submerged by a gigantic tsunami. He explains how the Roman Thames was wider and shallower – a place of gravel, reedbeds and sandbars…. Platt has a great knack for atmospheric details like these… “Lucy Lethbridge, The Oldie
“Frequently, the Environmental Agency is mentioned as a focus of people’s anger – a faceless, omnipotent bureaucracy on which every failure can be pinned. To his credit, Platt is neither fully dismissive nor wholly credulous of this position, and instead considers the tenor of his interviewees’ complaints late in the book as he stands outside the agency’s office near Millbank in London. This section is an exemplary piece of Brexit-era autocritique in which the author tries to gauge how much his own London-centric privilege might have shaped his attitudes.
Like any good psychogeographer, Platt is drawn to the mythical dimensions of the places he visits. He becomes particularly interested in stories of sunken cities, especially those supposedly inundated as a result of someone maliciously or accidentally opening a floodgate…
Musing on the metaphorical dimensions of “opening the floodgates”, Platt considers how the phrase resonates with people in the era of mass migration. (How many times did we hear variations of this metaphor during the Brexit campaign?) He shrewdly incorporates the crude moments of hostility and prejudice he overhears that speak of a deeper malaise. “Karl Whitney, Guardian
“Indeed, The Great Flood’s strength lies in the vivid historical context in which Platt’s subject is couched. Ancient boats dug up from the Humber are believed to have been left by immigrants from Egypt, we learn; and elsewhere Platt traces the word bund, meaning a levee, around the world from ancient Mesopotamia to Worcester. Just as all the Earth’s water is linked in a vast cycle, so too, the book suggests, are the fates of inter-reliant human beings…. Platt salutes resilience and adaptability – “warmth and civility contrasted with the cold dark expanse of water” – but recognizes that neither is infinite. Inarticulate blame frequently rises among victims, and not only towards authorities. Like Mark O’Connell, Edward Platt warns against becoming insular as individuals or tribes, especially as the perils facing us all are never far away. “Darran Anderson, TLS