Hell and high water

In between 4am clubbing in Ibiza and posing for her official Praise Singer - sorry, ‘Chief Photographer to the Deputy PM and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’ - Angela Rayner has been busy launching an independent New Towns Taskforce, presumably aimed at recreating the picturesque architectural charms of Basildon or Stevenage.

In the race to identify suitable sites for the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of new homes to be built in the next few years, a clear front-runner seems to be emerging in the shape of Tempsford, currently a village of some 600 inhabitants, which sits at the junction of major North-South and East-West road and (potentially) rail routes.

The site has already caught the eye of a developer, who has acquired the option to build 7,000 homes, while a think tank has argued that Tempsford should become a major city with homes for up to 350,000 people. All this would seem pleasantly logical in the abstract - unless, of course, you are a resident of this serene and pleasant village - but all is not quite as rosy as it seems.

As it happens, this used to be familiar ground to me; my grandparents lived nearby and, as a child, I often visited family friends on their riverside smallholding a few miles away, where the Great Ouse bursting its banks was a regular and spectacular occurrence - ensuring that the goats were safely penned up out of harm’s way was one of my favourite tasks when the river was high (the house and barn, which dated back to Tudor times, were perched on a 20ft rise above river level - our ancestors weren’t stupid).

Technology has moved on since those days and it is now possible, from the comfort of one’s own armchair, to get an idea of how things are going. While the government flood warning map below represents the worst-case scenario, it gives a pretty good idea of the potential hazard area even when most of the surrounding land is fields and woods rather than tarmac and concrete.

I hope those 350,000 future residents can swim.