FORUM: Seven inches of rain fell in one hour

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Published: 27 January, 2011
by SIR ALAN BUDD

With news that Hampstead Heath needs £12m spent on strengthening dams to stop a catastrophic flood hitting Dartmouth Park, Parliament Hill Fields and Gospel Oak

THE summer of 1975 was hot and dry so when the rain started to fall on August 14 I was very pleased and put out buckets and bowls to catch the rain for the garden.  

Then I remembered that my wife Susan was on Hampstead Heath with our two-year-old son, Joel, and set off with an umbrella to rescue them.  

The rain fell… and fell… and fell. Our house was on the corner of Laurier Road and York Rise, in Dartmouth Park. The garden and lower ground floor were some way below road level and water started to pour down the slope from the pavement into the garden. I was afraid that it would get into the kitchen and storage space and tried to block the bottoms of the doors.  The water rose so quickly that at one stage I was stuck in the storage space, unable to open the door, with the water rising around me. With a neighbour’s help I escaped back into the kitchen and could see water about 4ft deep against the glass door of the kitchen. The glass broke and water poured in. At its peak it was about 4ft 6ins deep and our fridge-freezer was floating freely. The garden walls were swept away.

There were surreal moments. At the peak of the flood the phone rang and I was asked by an American about some economic forecasts.  “I’m up to my chest in water!” I explained.  “Yeah, yeah,” came the reply. “But what about the second quarter stock-building numbers?”  

A tortoise floated into the garden. (We were later able to reunite it with its owner.) A complete stranger walked into the house, looked round, said nothing and walked out again. (A burglar? Camden Journal reporter?)  

Two days later a man in white overalls called and asked if we had any bodies. We had to disappoint him. There were moments of drama. As I walked down York Rise a woman screamed from her front door “Help! Save my babies from drowning.”  

Water was pouring through the front door into her bungalow. We took them to the relative safety of our living room.

It was bad enough – floodwater is really  dilute sewage and it took months for our walls to dry out. It could have been tragic. Our son slept on the lower ground floor. If the flood had happened at night and we hadn’t woken he would have drowned.

Seven inches of rain fell on Hampstead Heath in an hour. Though very local, it was one of the greatest storms of the 20th century and is much discussed in meteor­ological circles.  

The rain cloud was trapped on the Highgate Lift, and hence the extraordinary downpour. The Fleet River, covered over and many feet deep, runs from the Hampstead ponds down York Rise and eventually reaches the Thames. It acts as the waste water system. It couldn’t cope with the storm so it flooded the road and everything below it. We now live on a higher floor (though much nearer to the ponds). 

It wasn’t Brisbane but we wouldn’t want to live through that experience again.

• Sir Alan Budd is an economist, a founding member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and was chairman of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility in 2010