More fool them then if they feel they must do that, you don't have to go that far up the hill to get to drier ground. Look at Riverside in Cambridge just one row of houses flood on the river front while all else behind them are dry..
Once...
Its not anymore so I suppose if people choose to live there then they must accept the consequences. Talk of building flood barriers levees etc isn't going to happen in reality is it?..
If you what to factor in the costs of that then fine ..though I don't suppose many might..
I think most have noticed by now that NP has a grudge against Cambridge;)
Mind U I can't help but agree with a lot of it;!...
It's not there yet, but it *could* be - now that our factories and engineering sites have been systematically demolished (bastards), so much of modern work is in buildings that could be bleedin' well anywhere - there's no reason that they *have* to be in a big city, or in a lot of cases even clustered together (because there's no interaction or dependency between them).
In other words, make the housing more local to the workplace, but spread the workplaces out so that the room exists in the first place to have that housing local (compared to current scenario of business all clumped together, and people commuting from miles away to reach them).
Hey, I like that ;)
Sure - but it depends on how much the cost of house ownership will go up by in areas prone to flooding (flood protection, plus extra insurance cost) versus how much extra it costs to build a house (and supply it with utility services) on higher ground in the first place.
Except with far more complicated lives, unfortunately...
Yep, and work needs to go where the people are; the only problem at the moment is that the work tends to get lumped together on business parks surrounding large towns / cities.
It's not one of those changes that can happen overnight, but I can't help thinking there's got to be a way of reversing the trend of massive population density in some areas and comparative low density (often with high unemployment) in others. Over the space of 100 years or whatnot, I'm sure it could be done...
Probably. yes.
In the end if its what it takes to make a parcel of land developable, and the buildings insurable, its no big deal to take all the spoil from foundation digs, heap it up in a big earth bank and build an access road on it surrounding a housing estate.
Plus a little sewage pumping station inside..or even a complete sewage treatment plant. And pump the outflow instead - its clean. This is really possible. The big problem is that the water that would have flooded it, goes somewhere else instead.
What you PROBABLY need is a thwacking great hollow somewhere that can - in extremis - absorb a few million cubic meters of water..that can take the normal rainwater runoff from the housing estate as well.
As we discovered here. We actually did build the house up a a bit, and dig a pond, which captures all the rainwater off the house area, and use the spoil from that to build a nice sort of raised dais overlooking the pond. When it rains and rains, that dais stays dry..
The cost was a few days with a 3 ton digger. About the most fun you can have with.....
So the plan for a floodplain would be..
Take one floodplain.
Develop half of it with buildings Dig the other half out to form a lake or pond, and use the material from that to either raise the housing estate higher, or at least build a levee round it.
Install local sewage treatment (takes about a cubic meter of tank per occupant), with large settlement tanks - and pump the outflow into the lake: No it isn't nasty sewage. Its potable water, at that point.
Now you have what amounts to a basin with buildings inside it, a sewage system that can cope with going uphill, and doesn't flood and dump raw sewage anywhere. Plus a lovely lake in what could be a park, suitable for swimming/canoeing and the like, which is specifically there to BE flooded in times of Great Rain.
Since the material you dig out goes to build up your settlement area, there is no big costs in transporting it. A few mighty diggers and dump tricks will do the job.
Since your sewage is treated locally in a biological digester, the runs to it are short, and within a flood protection levee..so that you no longer have to worry about sewers backing up.
It will need a few tankers every year to remove the compost, but that's useful muck too.
The same pumps that lift the sewage outflow can be used to lift local rainwater as well..over the levee and into the lake. All good stuff. Mostly they wouldn't be needed as teh lake would be below the sump levels, but if the lake floods, you need the pumps to keep the estate dry.
All of this is off the shelf stuff. The earthmoving isn't a PATCH on what a new motorway costs. Probably add less than £1000 to each house, depending on the height and depth required..The biological sewage stuff is available..either on a per house, per street or per estate basis..and it has huge advantages over using any antique Victorian sewers..first of all the runs are short so miles of pipework don't need to be laid, and secondly - unlike open sewage treatment plants, its all in a tank, and it doesn't whiff on hot weather. And finally, since its all cleaned up locally, you can mix rainwater DOWNsTREAM of it and have a fully pumpable (if necessary) basin inside the levees.
You have to realise that in the case of sewage, we have a history.
First sewers were simply ways to collect urban shit and put them into a river,.
Then we decided to clean them up a bit..and that means pumping sewage up, after it had flowed DOWN.... and steam engines were all we had, so sewage plants were large and expensive, and more so than the pipework that served them. Hence 'sewage treatment plants'..however these days electric motors are dirt cheap, and they don't consume vast amounts of power, so small scale sewage treatment is actually not only feasible, but cost effective. It certainly costs me less than I would pay in water charges to treat my own sewage here..a hundred quid every 4 years to empty the sludge, and the outflow is clean and runs straight into a ditch.
A LOT less cost than running a mile of pipework to the main sewer in the village..
I see absolutely no reasons not to build on flood plains at all, and indeed produce some very attractive and flood free properties, PROVIDED that each development is done under the express conditions that it can absorb in some way more water than the land area it uses, and that suitable steps are taken to ensure that it can e.g. stand a +5 meter water level rise for say 14 days.
Instead of PROHIBITING it, make sure it is done PROPERLY, and if the developer scratches his hairy arse and mutters 'it will cost too much' well then, build somewhere else. But in many cases, it will just mean say a £5k uplift on each house..but OTOH if there is a nice lake and a park next door...and insurance rates are lower..because its done properly..and it IS bang next to somewhere where work exists.. I don; think the houses will stand empty.
It could just as easily have been Maidenhead, Guildford. Swindon, Reading..all nice market towns that have been ruined by cheap and nasty development from being market towns into basically one huge commuter style holiday inn.
If you buy and old house, that has a couple of nice nits in it, some not too bad extensions, and a whole plot of crumbling nasty rooms and lean-tos arranged round it, you would do a cost benefit analysis and probably fix up the good bits, and demolish and rebuild large parts of the rubbish, and end up making a much nicer property. You would also probably rewire it, replumb it and build more car parking spaces, and a better drive..
AND SELL IT ON AT A PROFIT.
The same should be true of towns.
I bet that 90% of e.g. cambridge residents, faced with a compulsory purchase order at 20% above market rates, and the prospect of first refusal on a new house - possibly even to their design but plonked on top of decent roads, cycle ways, a nice pub nearby (or keep the old one like they did with the Red Cow..how DID that survive?) proper off road parking..would jump at the chance.
Simply shoving the problem, onto e.g. a farm in Cambourne, doesn't really help: Half the people who live there now need every inch of the new road to DRIVE back into the science park..
The person I know who WORKS in Cambourne, lives now in papworth...;-)
Reed bed.
cheers, clive
I think you forget one HUGE point. It costs a lot more to move houses than to move jobs.
IF - taking cambridge as the case in point, since you are a cam.miscer - you work in IT in Cambridge, you probably do so because if ONE job goes sour on you, there are probably another ten around for which you are qualified.
The same is NOT true in general. As an employer I could NOT move the business out of Cambridge, because all the radical left leaning IT guys lived IN cambridge and demanded a job within cycling distance.
Its a huge catch 22. There is very little entrepreneurial IT for example, north of the midlands. The chief reason is that there isn't any there to start with. It's a poor place to site a business, because there is not that skillset there, and its a poor place to move to, because there is no IT work.
Until and unless true remote working becomes a reality, factors like that are still going to dominate the housing situation.
Likewise 'distributed housing' - essentially turning the UK into one vast suburb, has a lot of downsides too.
Firstly it is boring as sin. You lose the countryside forever. It becomes even more managed 'parkland' than it is already. To an extent it is already but only to an extent: There are wilder patches in it to delight and to show people what 'nature in the raw' is like.
Secondly, even removing the constraints of the necessity to work large tracts of it are quite EXPENSIVE to build on. Thinking of one trip across the northeenmost lump of Scotland, where there were three houses in 60 miles, and a single track road across a peat bog..tundra basically
- well there is room for about 10 towns there..BUT..where will the materials come from? the power? the whole INFRASTRUCTURE needs to be physically transported in there and put in place. You may say that people can be anywhere, but house far away from concrete works, brick yards and halfway across bogs with limited access are going to cost big money. There is a good reason why that particular tract of land - its as big as a county - is basically uninhabited. There isn't a single good reason why anyone would WANT to live there. Apart fro being a total recluse maybe. There are no natural resiources, poor communications, the scenery is dull, the weather is appalling, and I doubt there is a TV transmitter or a telephone exchange for 60 miles.
No doubt you could buy enough land for a house for a few hundred quid..if you wanted.
Thirdly, rural land is not simply doing nothing. Or being farmed buy a few super rich people and lived in by a few others. It does a sight more than that. It is where most of the food we *don't* import comes from. It is where the most carbon is being sucked out of the air, and oxygen generated. It is where all the water you don't want in your house, but do want in the tap comes from, and is stored and managed (or sometimes not ;-)) It is where about 90% of all the species of life currently residing in this country, have their habitats, apart from the human one, which lives in anthills called towns. Its the barley in your beer, and the honey on your toast. The chicken and chips in the takeaway.
Fourthly, at some point if it is all built over, you still run into a limit.
Fifthly, there are sound energy and resource reasons for concentrating houses at least into villages, if not into towns and cities.
There needs to be a debate first of all, about whether or not we should let the population grow beyond its current levels. Frankly I think it would be a richer happier country at 50 of the population level it is today, but there you go.
If we do need more housing, for the reason stated above I think that low density suburban sprawls are the worst of all possible worlds.
Let's explode a few myths. Gardens. How many people actually grow stuff in their gardens? very few. They are ignored by teenagers, used for outside parties by the student and beyond age group, become super toy-littered playpens for the toddlers of the middle aged, and are disused ot become dumping grounds when they leave home and the parents are too tired to maintain them.
In fact, no one today needs a garden that much. What they need is leisure space and safer playing areas for kids. Those could be communal as easily as not.
Myth no 2 is that a detached house is everyones dream. Not really. What people want is insulation from their neighbors, not a 6 " gap between two outside walls that the wind whistles down. Which if filled with insulation would probably cost bugger all and redce heatloss by 10%..
Mtyh no 3 is that peole feel alienated when they can't lean on the fence and talk to the neighbours or pop next door for a bowl of sugar..when dod you last do either of those.?
So I say the answer is in fact high density urban housing.
But not council built 'tower blocks' We dont need the outside space, so lets use the ground area well., and build up. Balconies provide suitable outside rooms for partying, and roof gardens are really nice, and toddlers can play in creches within the units. they tick all the ecological boxes to..high volume per unit area of ground (doesn't concrete over) high volume per unit outside walls (a hemisphere is actually best here..interesting design challenge..highly efficient single point distribution of resources and collection and treatment of waste (give each building a gigabit internet connection its own sewage treatment plant, waste burning facility to do hot water and generate power with) and even build a pub into the lower floors, and park cars underneath it..Why..if it has offices in it - teleoffices perhaps, you wouldn't even need to put on a coat to go to work..
I could even sketch out a few designs that would make immesnely interesting projects. Integrate MOST of what people want into a 'microcity' inside one glass dome.
That's what I'd put in Romsey town. Probably be a great place to be, and would attract the tourists also! Upstairs on the outside, residential, balconies and roof gardens.. Inside and lower down, malls and offices..at the bottom car parking and underneath, heat light power and sewage stuff, comms and freight access.
And indeed maybe a train or bus station.
Cambridge could treble its population in a thoroughly green way without touching one bit of green belt.
Twickenham CENTER? I didn't know it had one.
I think the whole 'lets keep industry and residential separate' has its roots in big clunky massive factories.
Todays workplace is quite, clean and doesn't need huge lorries moving in and out.
If industrial is (is it?) subdivided as bit further than light and heavy, I see no reason not to mix it up completely. Its pretty damned silly that you can't say employ 3-5 people in a large house in the suburbs packing up stuff for a mail order business for example.
Exactly the opposite of my own Borough's planning policy which will only allow employment uses of any size in existing town centres, allegedly to safeguard their vitality (hollow laugh which will be understood by anyone who has visited Twickenham town centre).
I thought of that too..the problem there is that they CAN whiff. Yes they do the job, but an aerobic digester is sealed, and I suspect a bit more acceptable to today's suburbanites.
Maybe my braincells are playing tricks - it was a few years ago and sounded so completely bonkers that I didn't waste much thinking time on it :)
Sounds feasible, wonder if anyone might try it?....
I doubt it. Can you see words like 'intelligence' 'engineering quality' common sense' 'imagination' 'inventive but practical solution' appearing in te same sentence as 'local government' 'planning officer' central government' 'politician' without and explicit negative?
One of the reasons why I favour having a sprinkling of very rich and powerful people in the world, is that occasionally one of them does something like this.
In any large organisation, the motivation of the decision makers is not to come up with the right answers, but to stall any and all solutions apart from the one that didn't get his predecessor sacked..
Its lowers common denominator thinking.
Cf
Mind you there are some ridiculous examples of architects egos around
Take one half and dig a hole. Spread the spoil on the other half. Build on it. Let gravity take care of the sewage, etc.
Drawback.. you lose half the land that you could be selling houses on.
Do the cost effective alternative.. dig a hole.. fill it with rubbish.. cap it.. build on it. Well tried and used on a lot of land. Just look for the small brick vent towers and you will see just how much this happens.
Ah, but where does the water go?
Both ideas have been discussed and work. The military *are* interested in using ground based lasers to illuminate solar panels on their satellites. There's this big round thing that keeps getting in the way of the sun so people sneakily wait until it's dark before moving stuff because the spy satellites are relying on battery power. If you could shine a big enough torch on them, especially one that can be tuned to match the most efficient wavelengths of solar panels, they could do more.
Solar Power coming down would use satellites in geosynchronous orbit, so the eclipse periods are much shorter but there's a big column of microwaves shining on the receiving grid which could do interesting things to aircraft instruments. The power density isn't that great though, proposals for the ground end usually involve the gubbins being attached to poles high enough and far enough apart for normal farming activities to take place underneath.
Anthony
That doesn't sound particularly stable, though (even more so with using landfill waste) - or is there a hidden "wait 20 years" step prior to building? (Which isn't necessarily a problem, *providing* politicians can get their act together and start thinking beyond 2-3 years into the future)
Somewhere else.. which is all the builders care about.
Do you really think military satellites rely on solar power and batteries? Why do you think they have booster rockets to get rid of them when they are end of life?
Stability is easy just drive some piles.. its cheap these days.
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