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iAfter the latest flood, Tenbury Wells town center was a scene of chaos. The main street was covered with a layer of mud, shop windows were broken and piles of soaked furniture and goods, all ruined, were piled up along the street.
“On Monday, when we walked in, we wanted to leave, lock the doors and just be gone,” said Richard Sharman, owner of Garlands Flowers. “We’ve lost around £6,000 and we won’t get a penny back. Six weeks ago we lost about £4,000 in a flood.
Mr Sharman has been trading in the heart of Tenbury for around seven years and became emotional as he said: “If we get flooded again I will leave and the landlords can sue us. I don’t care, I’m going broke. I have enough.”
The Worcestershire market town made headlines this week when a 57-year-old man drove a tractor at high speed down a flooded Main Street on Sunday, sending a wave of water into businesses that smashed windows and doors, adding to the devastation.
This caused outrage and the driver was arrested. He then apologized and said he was in a hurry to help a friend save someone from the floods.
Locals said they hoped the headlines would draw attention to the existential threat Tenbury faces – that without help it could become the first town center in the UK to be abandoned due to flooding exacerbated by climate change.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it could potentially be abandoned,” said Dave Troup, a retired Environment Agency (EA) area manager and flood expert. “It sounds like a dramatic statement, but people are already voting with their feet.
“If you keep flooding once or twice a year and you can’t get insurance, you just can’t keep going. Without some sort of flood protection, the future looks very bleak indeed.
Tenbury has been flooded seven times by the River Teme in the past four years and business owners said they had only just recovered from flooding on October 17 when the latest deluge hit.
Tenbury Wells is in a particularly precarious position as it is a flat, low-lying town almost surrounded by water – the Teme to the north and a tributary, the Kyre Brook, to the south.
The town is often flooded by the Thames and the Kyre Brook overflows into the town center when the Thames is full and has nowhere else to go. It can submerge streets in seconds and this time knocked down a wall keeping the water off the main street.
“This is a particularly dangerous flood because it occurs so quickly; there’s not that much warning,” Troup said. “With the Teme and Kyre Brook, Tenbury gets stuck from two separate sources.”
The climate crisis means the problem is getting worse. Teme flood peaks at Tenbury are projected to increase by an average of 20% over this decade, even under a scenario with lower emissions increases. Residents have raised the alarm about houses being built in flood plains.
Most people downtown can’t afford insurance — premiums are too high because flooding is so common, they said. Businesses and homeowners adapted accordingly by placing electrical outlets high, not storing things on the floor, and making makeshift flood defenses.
But humans can only do so much, and some have decided that this latest flood may be the end of the road.
“With all the stock we lost, plus everything else, we’re talking probably £25,000 to £30,000 worth of damage,” said Laura Jones, owner of Rainbow Crafts, which she built from a market stall a few years ago.
“I’ll have a pop-up to sell off the rest of my stock and then take it from there – that might be it or I might be able to carry on.” But I know at least three companies that throw in the towel after that. It will become a ghost town.
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Next door, a beauty shop run by Stephanie Hopkins was boarded up and splashed with mud. “We think the business can be completed,” she said. “We put so much money into it, and it all just disappeared. We can’t afford insurance.
Tenbury Independent District Councilor Leslie Bruton said: “The business cannot afford to continue. They can’t afford to replace the stock, and while we don’t have protection, businesses won’t want to come to town. And residents find they can’t sell their homes.
“And climate change is having a significant impact on rainfall. When it rains now, it is stronger and stronger. The soil is completely saturated.
The flood defense battle for the city has been going on for decades, but will be “the most complex EA has ever tackled,” Bruton said.
It will necessitate the construction of a wall and a series of locks around almost the entire city centre, in an expensive and complex scheme which is predicted to cost around £30m – up from £7m a decade ago. Half of the funding has already been secured and the government has been called on to match the rest.
“Prices keep going up, and the final design is so complex that there are 20 different airlocks. Some of the walls are in very sensitive areas so they would have to be made from historic bricks and historic England had to be involved,” said Harriet Baldwin, Conservative West MP Worcestershire.
“But the modeling suggests that with climate change, floods will be even more frequent and unpredictable because you don’t know where the flash flood is going to happen.”
“So we will keep pushing until we get the money. The longer they wait, the more expensive it will be.
The government has said it will invest £2.4 billion before March 2026. to improve flood resilience across the country, but there is no confirmation that this will include full funding for the Tenbury flood defense scheme.
Throup said one obstacle is that the cost of flood defenses is greater than what would be saved by minimizing flood damage. “It has not materialized because it is not economic,” he said. “But it has to happen soon.”
“We’re only a small town, I don’t know if we can take much more than that to be honest,” said Tracey O’Mahony, who lives in Tenbury and works in a bathroom store.
Five days after the flood, the storefront is still lined with sandbags and flood boards, and customers are being directed to go around the back.
“We’re too scared to take anything down in case it rains all next week, and we don’t even have that wall this time,” O’Mahony said.
“It’s going to kill the city if it keeps coming up because people won’t want their business here, and those who already have their business here are frankly tired of it.” We need help very quickly – it’s like we’re stuck on an island and everyone has forgotten about us.”
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