Mill Stream House in Stadhampton, Oxfordshire, is named after the brook that runs beside the 18th-century property. Mindful of the flood risk, the original builders laid the base of the house 3 feet above the brook. The home’s coach house, built around the same time and converted into a home in the mid-1980s, was on ground level, however. When Richard Pryor and his wife started renting it in 2016, it was hard to imagine the home would ever flood. The Environment Agency website, which based warnings on the water level of the brook 3 miles upstream at Chalgrove, showed the danger was remote.
Water levels above 55cm placed low-lying local land at risk — when out walking their dog, the Pryor family would sometimes pass waterlogged fields. Local properties were at risk when levels surpassed 81cm. But even when the brook reached 1.22m in February 2014, the highest level recorded by the EA, the former coach house wasn’t touched. It had never flooded since the owners, Pryor’s parents-in-law, bought the home in 1984.
But on January 8 last year, following several days of heavy rainfall, Pryor and his wife woke at 2am to barking from the kitchen. The dog was standing in 4 inches of water, which was leaking through where the skirting boards met the vinyl tiles. Unable to absorb any more run-off, the ground was pushing water up from below. The Pryors’ home was being flooded from within.