Twice flooded and twice offered relocation, the people of Ardle have decided to stay and argue instead.

At half past six in the morning the water in the Ardle is the colour of strong tea, and it moves fast. From the stone bridge at the bottom of Mill Street you can still see the line it left on the walls of the terrace two winters ago, a brown band at the height of a man’s shoulder. Someone has painted a date beside it in white. Below that, fainter, is the date of the flood before.

Ardle has around 4,200 residents, two schools, a market square, a bakery that opens at five and a long habit of arguing. Twice in six years the river has come into the lower town. Twice the authorities have offered a plan to move the most exposed households to new homes on higher ground near the ring road. Twice the town has said no. This autumn, after months of meetings, it said no again, and then said something more interesting: it would stay, and it would write its own plan.

The offer on the hill

The second relocation scheme, published last spring, was generous by most standards. Around 380 households in the lower town would have been offered a new house of equivalent size on a site two miles away, with moving costs paid and a guarantee that no one would be worse off. The old streets would have been cleared and turned into wetland.

Officials thought the offer would be accepted. At a public meeting in the school hall in May, it was rejected by a show of hands so large that nobody bothered to count.

“They kept describing it as a better house. Nobody here said their house was the problem. The problem is that you cannot move a town by moving its roofs,” said Margit Oyelaran, a retired midwife who chairs the residents’ association on the lower streets.

Mrs Oyelaran, who has lived on Weir Lane for forty-one years, keeps her furniture on breeze blocks from October to March. In the hallway is a plastic crate holding documents, medicines and a torch. She says she is not naive about the river. She simply does not believe that breaking up the neighbours who checked on each other through two floods makes anyone safer.

A plan written in the back room

What happened next took the authorities by surprise. A group of residents, a retired engineer, two farmers from upstream and the head of the primary school began meeting every Thursday in the back room of the Ferry Inn. Over the summer they produced a forty-page document that they now call the Stay Plan.

It asks for things that are neither cheap nor simple: raised floors and flood doors for every house below the 2-metre mark, a set of storage ponds on farmland upstream to slow the river after heavy rain, an early warning siren tied to gauges in the hills, and a register of residents who need help to leave quickly. It also proposes that the town’s lowest row of eleven houses, the ones that flood first and worst, be bought and demolished voluntarily, with their owners offered homes elsewhere in Ardle rather than on the edge of the city.

Joseph Akintola, the retired engineer, spent thirty years designing culverts and embankments. He is blunt about the limits. “We will flood again,” he said, walking the riverbank in boots and a borrowed hi-vis jacket. “The question is whether the water comes in for two days or two weeks, and whether people are ready for it. That is something we can change.”

Arguing as a strategy

Officials now say they are studying the Stay Plan seriously, and a joint working group has met three times. Some engineers remain unconvinced that upstream ponds will make enough difference, and the cost of fitting flood protection to several hundred older houses is far from settled.

In Ardle, though, the mood has shifted. People who did not speak at the first meetings now sit on sub-committees. The bakery has a noticeboard with the river level chalked on it each morning. The town has not won anything yet. But walking back up Mill Street as the light comes up, past doors fitted with new steel brackets for flood boards, it is hard to escape the sense that a place which might have been quietly dismantled has instead decided to make itself very difficult to ignore.