watery city

Aerial photo from the BBC: water surrounding Oxford

The floodwaters rising across southern England have hit Oxford at last: although the city centre seems to be fine, most of Botley, Osney Island, and Abingdon Road are underwater, and the facebook status messages of several friends feature nervous jokes about the evacuation of neighbors only a few minutes away. I have been procrastinating all day by gawping at the photos on flickr, the BBC website, and elsewhere. Port Meadow floods all the time (and makes a very pretty lake indeed) and is, in fact, meant to; the BBC was saying that the meadows around Oxford city have deliberately been preserved to act as flood barriers when the Thames breaks its banks. And I've seen Christ Church Meadow underwater before, if not as deep as this.

But the views of the Isis--that intimately familiar stretch of river, from Donny Bridge and Haystacks through the Gut, past the flooded boathouses and down to the Head of the River--are all transformed, so much so that I didn't recognize the locations of some of the photos at first. Is there a name for river conditions that go above and beyond "red flag"?

When we lived in Jericho, with its damp canalside atmosphere, I was always expecting floods to be a problem--and for most of the neighborhood's history, they were. According to this article--source of the below 1955 photo, taken just a few doors from our old house--it was always the faulty drains, rather than the river, that caused the water to rise. Repairs to the drains in the 1970s have kept Jericho's streets sound and unflooded since. So our successors at no. 35 Cardigan street, whoever they made be, are still dry.


Now I live by another canal in another city (and think of Jericho often, here in our new neighborhood), and yes--in a flood evacuation zone. But RA spent almost as much time on the river in Oxford as I did: if the hurricane waters ever rise around our flat, we'll manage to paddle away.