From sunken cities to coastal catastrophe … the everyday misery of the climate crisis
Edward Platt travels around Britain in search of the kind of apocalyptic deluge that increasingly swamps the country’s urban and rural landscapes. He is most interested in what people’s accounts of flooding, and his own first-hand observations of wading through sodden fields and streets, can tell him about the experience of such calamity. He writes that he’s “less preoccupied with the point the water reached or the rate at which it went down than with the emotional and psychological marks it left behind”.
How we visualise climate catastrophe tends toward the epic, the exotic. We seek to dramatise it through faraway scenes of the Romantic sublime gone awry: the polar ice collapsing from a glacier, the monstrous tsunami hitting a shore on the other side of the world. 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, and how the flood is merely the starting point for months and often years of misery as houses are dried out, refurbished – and, frequently, soon deluged again. The Great Flood makes the global local in the same way that the climate emergency does.
Brexit seems foreshadowed in the feelings of people who have experienced flooding of being ignored by the authorities
Related: Rising sea levels pose threat to homes of 300m people – study
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