Stories From Round Our Way

Retired engineer Roger Weatherell had just moved to Churchtown in 2015 when the first major flood happened. In these interviews he described how he helped build the first community-led construction of a significant flood defence scheme in the UK. He did it while recovering from illness, which he touches on too. We also had a chat with John Bracken, who’s the head flood warden for Churchtown. John...

Jim Kippax is a farmer and resident of Churchtown, a village in Lancashire which was flooded from river overflow twice in the space of 8 months in 2015 and 2016. The floods damaged 58 of around 100 houses in the village, so the victims came together and developed the first community flood defence scheme in the country. The people of Churchtown raised £100,000 from charities to build a clay and bri...

Craig Hope has been a firefighter in the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service for the last 30 years. He is the group manager for training and development for the service and an expert on wildfires. He told us how things have changed over his time as a firefighter: how the changes in weather impacts flooding, landslides and fire seasons, and how they’re all linked. He showed us around the Rhondda Va...

Debbie Wilkins is a British farmer. Her farm, the Norton Court Farm in the Severn Vale in Gloucestershire, is a mixed dairy, beef and arable farm. Debbie grew up on the farm and later inherited it from her father, and floods have always been part of her life, but the changes in weather over the last decade or so have made things a little more complicated. Some neighbours have stopped farming altog...