My name is Harry Holmes, and I’ve recently started a PhD in Geography at King’s College London under the supervision of Dr Alex Loftus.
It’s almost become the norm within Britain to expect severe flooding over the year, whether in the Somerset Levels or the Yorkshire Dales. With these now regular events and the broader problem of climate change, flooding now dominates many conversations about the weather in Britain.
My research will look at my home region of Yorkshire and the political ecology of adaptation to flooding over the last few decades. By situating several decades of flood events, planning, and political economic change, I hope to explore how the relationships between vulnerability to flooding, the built environment, and Britain’s political economy have changed over time.
Further, this research will look at some of the political dimensions of flooding today. For instance, there are the immediate aftermaths of floods, where leaders of political parties and Royal family members rush up to the affected areas. There is also the unstable economy of Britain and how the flooding in Yorkshire feeds into conversations about the so-called ‘Red Wall’, deindustrialisation, and the ‘levelling up’ of the North. Finally, there are the broader political economic trends of austerity and its impact on local environmental governance, the interaction between flood risk planning, the bonfire of planning ‘red-tape’, and the rentier economy in housing.
By exploring these dimensions, many vital questions become apparent. Over the last few decades, how has the increased ability to map flood risk changed how we prepare for flooding? How do planning systems, insurance premiums, and government grants interact to modify the built environment and community flood responses? Who does the labour of keeping floodwaters out of buildings? And most importantly, what determines who is flooded and who isn’t?
These questions, and others, are ones I am excited to tackle over the coming years.
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