I’m in London for a few days. It’s been raining hard now and again.
I never imagine the future with rain – my thoughts are always of sunny days. Does that make me an optimist? Do pessimists imagine rainy days? Or does it make me a fantasist?
But walking along familiar pavements in or just after heavy rain shows them in a different light. Huge deep pools appear forcing us all into the road with the cars – often along hardly-wet gutters while the pavement is a sodden wet land.
I took a moment to look around and saw water pouring off roofs onto the pavements. The drains couldn’t cope. Vehicles sprayed us all with water.
Were our towns and cities designed by optimists?
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Vehicles and their drivers always get the better deal. Compare the level of light on the road and the pavement in areas with parked cars. Usually much easier to see on the road (though don’t get me started on light pollution).
Regarding water we need sustainable drainage. (And drivers have a legal duty not to spray people, by the way.)
While all that rain water is rushing off roofs and over whelming drains highly treated mains water is being pumped into homes and businesses to flush No 1s and No 2s away. Shouldn’t it now be compulsory that ALL new build domestic, public or business incorporates water harvesting/rain water collection for non cooking/hygiene uses – i.e flushing the blog? That’s what crosses my mind when I see this, dreary person with Scottish Presbyterian gene (atheist) that I am.
Come a long way from roads deep in foul smelling mud and those dreadful scavenging Red kites overhead!
Yes, there are now no kites overhead.
You’ll have to do better than that, Les – proper Presbyterian work ethic requires suffering and what you are talking about looks like a win-win for modest cost. My house was built in 1790 and we still, today, water the garden with water off the roof – which would have been the main water supply when the house was built – far safer than polluted ground level watercourses.
For the rain that isn’t collected, we really should be filtering it through big, big reed beds – part of the Natural Capital Committees ‘250,000 hectares of community woodland close to our towns and cities’, saving energy, saving wildlife and saving people by bringing the natural world to their doorsteps.
Yes you’ve caught me out I tend to cherry pick my (atheistic) Presbyterianism- hate waste, not so strong on the work ethic side of things though. Good news about the Natural Capital Committee’s quote!
The biggest benefit of rainfall in London is that it precipitates much of the pollution and ‘clears the air’ so that, at least for a while, we don’t have to poison ourselves by breathing the city’s foul atmosphere.
There is a Maintenance Crisis – as in no-one has a budget for it and if they did no-one has the appropriate postgraduate qualification for removing twigs from gutters or drains so they just blame it on Globular Warming and start to cry
Well London was designed to be a soul breaking emotional trap, designed to siphon off all that is good and pure from the denizens, for the vainglory of a few of history’s true monsters.
People ask me what I would have in place of London, and I say “a smoking crater, given half the chance”.
Other towns and cities, less perverted by evil, are better. But don’t tell that to the Londoners, or they’ll spill out and ruin those too.
That was Goering’s vision
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
There are very few Londoners left in London.
It’s now home to people from everywhere!
I left as soon as I could. If I go back it is only when I have to. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner.