Working in partnership with the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames (LBRuT) and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), we have been awarded £6m from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to increase flood resilience in the Beverley Brook’s catchment in Richmond and areas of Wandsworth. The project runs over 6 years and is part of the £200m Flood and Coastal Resilience and Innovation Programme, managed by the Environment Agency (EA). We were one of 25 programmes selected to drive innovation in flood and coastal resilience and adaptation to a changing climate, across the country.

The project aims to:

• Improve the local communities’ flood resilience, using new and innovative ideas.
• Work with the community to shape and create the project, providing continuity and legacy.
• Equip the community with knowledge about how to become more resilient to flooding.
• Gather evidence to inform further investment in flood resilience, both locally and nationally.
• Create and adapt green and blue spaces to better cope with extreme weather events, with benefits including better water quality and biodiversity and improving amenity and recreation spaces; resulting in increases in health and wellbeing.

This project dovetails with BCL’s visions of conservation, biodiversity, wellbeing, lifelong learning and community engagement. We will provide detailed local knowledge of the area, catchment, habitats and species found there to the partnership, creating factual and anecdotal archives of events in and around our community. We will provide a focal point of resilience actions that individuals and groups of people can take.

Latest News

Our partnership is currently engaged in

• From early 2023 we will work with the community to develop solutions and find ways to improve flood resilience, together. We are developing our engagement and communications to do this.
• We are building a learning and education programme, which we will test in the 2022-2023 spring and summer terms.
• We are exploring areas where we can use solutions based on nature to manage flooding. We have already installed some small Sustainable Drainage Solutions (SuDS) on Rocks Lane and Station Road, helping to build evidence and reduce highways flooding issues.
• Work is starting to gather baseline data to measure the impacts of the project. As we progress the project, we will ask members of the public to help us gather this data, which will help support future projects, both locally and nationally.

How You Can Get Involved:

• Please share your photographs and experiences of historic and current flooding in Barnes, North Barnes, Mortlake and East Sheen. This will help us build a library of case studies. Images should be named ‘date, location, your initials’ e.g. “12 07 2021 Barnes Green JB”.
• We need to develop a group of local ‘Champions’ who want to help us reach out to the estimated community of over 20,000 people living in the project area, via street/neighbourhood/housing groups, schools, clubs and businesses. If you would like to be one of the people, please let us know.
• We are also looking to develop a base of volunteers that want to help us with our work on the ground. If this interests you, then please reach out.

To find out more about the project or to read about all of the 25 projects visit the EA website, or email [email protected] or [email protected].