River Quaggy

[Paul mabbott]

With all the gloom about excessive building, it's good to see a 'lost' river resurrected: Wildlife Extra - River Quaggy flows again
What next find the Fleet?

[Garden Carpet]

What an excellent scheme. Good to hear of something positive being done.
jaki

[smartie]

Thanks, Paul, that looks really interesting. I'll put it on my ever-growing list of places to visit.

[wyevilla]

At last an imaginative scheme to deal with flood management, albeit on a local scale. How nice to have some good news.

Thanks for sharing.

[Chiltern Chris]

Hi All,

There's actually quite a few of these schemes about now with a number of urban watercourses being de-culverted. The Quaggy is in south London, but if you want to see one in north London have a look at the river Brent in Tokyngton, just downstream of Brent reservoir. Also, not available for public viewing for security reasons, the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow has resulted in the Duke of Northumberland's river and Longford river being removed from 2km of culvert and being placed in 4km of open channel around the outside of the terminal at a cost of about £75 million - so the longest planning public enquiry in our history wasn't all bad news.

The Environment Agency's Thames Region staff have also produced strategic documents highlighting to local planning authorities the best places to undertake many more of these works as part of major developments.

On a larger scale Defra have set the Environment Agency's flood defence section targets to create 200Ha of UK Biodiversity Action Plan habitats each year as part of their flood risk management work, so these schemes should become more common, as should better use of the flood plain. The biggest barrier to this type of scheme becoming the norm is that 'green' schemes have problems with their cost/benefit analysis i.e. is it worth the extra cost to make it ecologically and socially friendly or not? It's easy to give a monetary value to concrete and flooded houses but not so easy to work out the monetary benefits of increased building costs for a water vole or an urban child's first sighting of the vole, a fishing heron or a dragonfly warming itself on a summer morning.

Cheers, Chris

[wyevilla]

Thanks Chris - its good to hear of these initiatives.

And welcome to WAB, by the way!