A man dubbed ‘Worcester's King Canute’ after building his own flood defences to protect his £600,000 home has shared his tips on how to "stop the tide".
Nick Upton, 60, won the admiration of his neighbours when he kept his 17th century property safe by surrounding it with a wall and pumps last winter.
Dramatic aerial pictures showed the four-bedroom detached house circled by rising flood water after the River Severn burst its banks earlier this year.
Nick Upton, 60, won the admiration of his neighbours when he kept his 17th century property safe by surrounding it with a wall and pumps last winter.
Dramatic aerial pictures showed the four-bedroom detached house circled by rising flood water after the River Severn burst its banks earlier this year.
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00:00My name is Nick Lupton. I live with my wife Annie in our house right next to the River
00:07Severn just south of Worcester. We've experienced quite a few floods over the last few years.
00:13It appears to be getting worse. Our house has got really good flood resilience measures
00:18in place but because of the increase in frequency of flooding that we're experiencing we decided
00:24to build a wall around our house. So we've spent last year building the wall and we tested
00:31it last winter three times with three floods that we had and it's worked very well. The
00:36main motivation for building the wall was to protect the house from the water. Over
00:42the years the bricks were never really drying out in the winter. Having now built a wall
00:49around the house it keeps the house bricks dry throughout the winter. There's been quite
00:53a bit of press interest in the wall, the Great Wall of Pixham. Due to the press coverage
00:59people phoning me up and wanting to know how they could build a wall or whether they could
01:04build a wall with planning permissions. After quite a few phone calls I thought I'd probably
01:10better to just write it all down on what we went through to tell the story of how we built
01:15the wall. I sat down and spent a couple of months writing it all up. Quite cathartic
01:20to do that and realise how much work we did put into building the wall. It was then picked
01:25up by Mary Longdono who is better known as Flood Mary. Mary has published the book on
01:32her webpage floodmary.com. It's a book about how to build a flood wall. Hopefully it's
01:39got enough information for somebody who is not a construction background or engineering
01:45background person to understand what goes into the detail of building a wall that will
01:52work and stop water getting into the house. It's available, it's free to flood victims.
01:59Expect the worst, prepare for it and hopefully you will be able to firstly keep the water
02:06from your house by putting the right mitigations in place and having a house that is recoverable.
02:12If you do get water in the house, how do you recover? Don't use fibre kitchen units,
02:18use plastic kitchen units so that you can disinfect your house and get back to normal
02:24living quite quickly.