“There’s been so much on the TV about Cumbria and the north-west – but what about us?” asked Andy Feeley as he helped his brother Ian clear his ruined house in the pretty town of Corbridge, Northumberland. Sodden carpets, muddy sofa cushions and soggy kitchen units were heaped up in the back garden, the shed tipped on its side, tools spewing out on to the grass.

“They kept showing an aerial shot of Carlisle football pitch, but they could just as easily have come here and shown our rugby and cricket pitches under water,” he said on Wednesday, gesturing to the waterlogged fields behind him, where fish were swimming in the car park a day earlier.

This is the second time Ian Feeley’s house, near Corbridge station, has flooded in 10 years. Houses on his lane and nearby Station Road were engulfed by waters 1.5 metres deep when the river Tyne rose over flood defences completed in January at a cost of £400,000.

According to the Environment Agency, at the height of the storm the Tyne rose to 6.4 metres in Corbridge – the river’s highest recorded level by well over a metre. Flooding has left 45 families in the town homeless.

A total of 99 properties were flooded in Northumberland, according to the council, including 16 in Haydon Bridge, 10 on the Tyne Mills industrial estate in Hexham and eight in Ovingham.

Fifteen families have had to leave their homes in Haydon Bridge, 10 miles upstream of Corbridge. The Davisons – Kathleen, her husband Lyndon and their teenage daughters – were one such family. On Wednesday, humidifiers were drying out their ground floor, scented candles lit to hide the damp smell, as they prepared to move into rented accommodation for the second time in 10 years.

“Last time, in 2005, the water was up to our skirting boards – it went half a foot above that this time,” said Kathleen. “But at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how high it goes. If it gets in, the whole ground floor is ruined. We’ll have to move out for at least six months.”

“We’re just forgotten about up here,” said Lyndon, complaining that much of the focus locally was on Corbridge, with its more affluent population, independent shops and Roman heritage. “We’re basically a working village. They’re trying to close our fire station at the moment, yet without it the flooding here would have been a hundred times worse.”

“The north-east generally gets forgotten,” he added. “Look at what happened after the floods last year in the Somerset levels. How much has the government promised to spend there? £15.5m is it? And they’ve dredged the rivers. What are they going to do here? I think there’s a north-south divide in flood protection in this country.”

Back in Corbridge, John Rowland was coordinating the effort to clear up the rugby club. “Ten years ago it cost us £160,000 to put the place right, and the excess on our insurance went up to £10,000. This time we estimate the bill will come to £200,000. We lost a brand-new tractor, all the team kits; the kitchen and bar will need to be ripped out, a new dancefloor put in.

“We can’t afford to relocate so we’ve decided that the entire new club house will basically be washable: concrete floors, the whole place basically hose-down-able. Like those pubs in York that are always flooding.”



Round the corner, on Station Road, John Holmes was waiting for the loss adjuster to arrive at his home so he could start chucking out everything from the ground floor: the cream carpet, turned chocolate brown by the mud; an antique dresser; the contents of kitchen drawers filled with filthy water. He and his wife, Liz, did not leave their home after receiving Environment Agency warnings on Saturday and were rescued on Sunday by a life raft, climbing down a ladder from their first-floor bedroom window.

Holmes was philosophical about his situation. “I remember last time it was just after the tsunami and I said to people that at least we weren’t in that situation. It’s the same now. There’s always someone worse off.”

Despite the prospect of renovating the whole of the ground floor – again – Feeley wasn’t angry. “The Environment Agency has already spent so much money raising the flood defences. What more can they do, really? Do you really want to be living in the shadow of a big concrete wall? It’ll be like living in East Berlin.”

He said he was trying to take some positives from the situation. A builder by trade, he will be paid by his insurance company to renovate his own home (“On the upside, it’s nice to keep the house up to date,” he joked) and he said he didn’t want to move. “I still want to live here. I think about all the lovely walks we have by the river, those summer evenings sitting in the back garden with the patio doors open, the grandchildren playing, woodpeckers feeding. Listen to me, I could write a poem. We’ll be back.”



