From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities

Project Description

From Noah to Now charts a centuries-long fascination with flooding and the Noah myth in the literature of England’s coastal and estuary communities across time. It sets this deep cultural history within the context of the heightened flood risks facing coastal and estuary communities now and in the future, focusing on three case-study regions: Hull and Lincolnshire, London and South-East, and Bristol and South-West. The project asks how we harness the power of historical flood stories to build future resilience to flooding in coastal and estuary communities, and how we work within the framework of the UK government’s 2022 strategy for teaching sustainability and climate change to embed arts and humanities approaches to flooding in schools.

The IPCC (2022) have reported that climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity and severity of flood hazards in coastal regions, and yet while there is an urgent need to build resilience to coastal water crises, in the UK there are also significant challenges to coproducing climate action in some coastal and estuary communities where embedded intersectional inequalities are not only impacting on education and wellbeing, but on environmental resilience. We know fiction can play a key role in communicating flood risk, and research has shown how stories of living with water and flood that are rooted in local geographies, literatures, and histories can help make the global story of rising seas locally meaningful. We therefore need to equip communities at risk of flooding with the necessary cultural capital to enable them to communicate, contextualise, and historicise today’s water risks in locally meaningful ways. From Noah to Now addresses this research gap by providing the first, in-depth account exploring how the experience of living with water and flood risk in English coastal and estuary regions leaves its mark on the distinctive literary identities that, we argue, these cultures of risk help create. The project charts these connections between literature and the lived experience of flooding across the longue duree – from the Old English Beowulf to contemporary climate fiction – and reads a range of writers, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, through a new interdisciplinary lens that blends literary analysis with Environmental History approaches to histories of water management and participatory research methods drawn from Cultural Geography.

The project pilots arts and humanities approaches to teaching the topic of flooding in primary schools by collaborating with three project partners – Hull Music Hub, Hull Choral Union, and Grimsby Minster; with eight primary schools located in areas of Hull and North-East Lincolnshire that have been identified by UK Government as priorities for flood risk awareness campaigns; and with artistic director, Lisa Coates, to co-produce public performances of Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera, Noyes Fludde (1958), at Hull and Grimsby Minsters. The project will measure the impact of these collaborations on flood risk awareness via stakeholder interviews, audience evaluations, and ethnographic observations of young people in classroom settings supported by the project’s PDRA, using fieldwork findings from our case study region to inform recommendations for future uses of flood stories in classrooms and communities across England. Outputs include a monograph, journal article and conference presentations; a collection of digital education resources for teaching flooding through the arts and humanities in primary schools; and policy publications targeted at national education policy audiences through the Education Policy Institute.

The project’s findings will therefore be wide-reaching and transformative: for the disciplines of English, Education, Environmental History, and Cultural Geography; for coastal and estuary communities; for national sustainability and climate change education strategy; and for young people, who are likely to be most impacted by a future of increased flood risk and who therefore have most need for the arts and humanities-led adaptation strategies we develop here.