Hassocks Community Organisation

By Fred Maillardet

This has been the winter of floods: record rainfalls across the country, with a series of intense storms dumping a month’s-worth of rain in a day or two. Has Hassocks just been lucky to avoid flooding, despite the recent torrential rain? Maybe, but a group of local residents has been working for the last four years on natural flood management to reduce flood risk in our village. Our Floods and SuDS (Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems) group is composed of members of HKD Transition and Hassocks Community Organisation (HCO) together with the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust (OART).

The natural flood management approach is to ‘slow the flow’ – that is to reduce the volume of water entering the five tributaries which converge on the Herring Stream in the village. We have built ‘leaky’ debris dams in Lag Wood, built Rain Gardens in Adastra Park and Adastra Avenue and installed Rain Planters throughout Hassocks. An interpretation board in Adastra Park gives more details. We are also working with Downlands School on tree planting on their grounds.

This winter, Spitalford Bridge in the centre of Hassocks did not ‘choke’ as it did in similar storms in 2016, thus avoiding a repeat of the flooding in Parklands Road that year. It is now being recognised nationally that ‘the Government needs to increase the creation of more natural drainage systems...’ (The Guardian 17th Feb) and ‘to continue throwing concrete and endless amounts of money at defences such as high walls won’t stop the flooding’ (The Telegraph 11th Feb). The major flooding in Fishlake is now recognised by many flood experts to have been exacerbated by the £86m of hard engineered flood defences put in upstream to protect Sheffield. These defences had the effect of moving water quicker and in large volumes to downstream areas.

Sadly this pattern appears to have been repeated more recently in the Calder Valley which flooded for the third time in seven years despite about £30m already spent in the region on hard engineered defences.

The modest measures being taken in Hassocks do appear to be having an effect. We must prepare for more intense storms in future and it would appear that we are on the right track.