Stories From Round Our Way

In this story we hear from Abi and Steve Churchley, whose family home in Stockport, where they live with their two daughters, has been flooded twice in recent years, first in 2019 and again in 2025. They describe the shock of seeing their home submerged for a second time, the emotional toll of rebuilding, and the growing sense of uncertainty that comes with living in a changing climate.

Almost a year on from the most recent flood, Abby and Steve are still repairing the damage and looking to install property flood protection measures to safeguard their home. But their...

In this story we speak with Ian Campbell, a beekeeper and spokesperson for the British Beekeepers Association, at his apiary near Newcastle. Ian has been keeping bees for decades, witnessing firsthand how a changing climate is reshaping their behaviour and the environment they depend on.

He explains how extreme weather, unpredictable seasons, and shifting ecosystems are making it harder for colonies to thrive, from disrupted flowering patterns to food shortages and disease. We talk about the crucial role bees play in global food security, the mounting challenges facing beekeepers across the UK, and Ian’s reflections on wh...

In this story we visit The Royal Oak in Brandon, just outside Coventry, a pub that flooded 12 times during the winter of 2023/24. Owner Khara Schrijvers describes the devastation caused by Storm Henk, when brown floodwater forced the pub to close for four months and left behind burst pipes, cracked floors, damaged roofs, and a repair bill of around £180,000.

Faced with uncertainty about whether the business could survive, Khara considered closing the doors for good. Instead, she chose to invest in protecting the building - installing custom-made aluminium flood gates on new brick walls surrounding the pub, designed t...

In this story we speak with Adrian Bartlett and Dave Stevens at Newlyn Harbour in Cornwall, home to the trawler the Crystal Sea for the past 47 years. Adrian began his fishing career in the mid-1980s, spending over three decades at sea before stepping ashore in 2011. Since then, he’s co-founded The Really Interesting Crab Company to promote the quality of local shellfish, helped launch the Crabstock Festival, and set up a pop-up restaurant to connect people with UK seafood. He also trains new entrants to the industry, sits as vice chair of Fishing into the Future, and consults fo...

In this story we speak with David Thomas and Jason Greenway at Springwater Farm, on the Killerton Estate in Devon. David is a senior land advisor who works on natural flood management (leaky dams, scrapes and bunds), and Jason runs Springwater Farm with his wife Amelia. Together they have designed a small patch of wetland to slow the flow of water, reduce flooding, encourage vegetation during droughts, and make space for wildlife.

When Jason and Amelia took the land on, it was a heavy input farm, and since then they have been experimenting with agroforestry, silvopasteur, and...

In this story we hear from Pete Paragreen, a retired electrician and long-time resident of Burstwick, a small village just outside Hull that was hit hard during the devastating 2007 floods. While Pete’s home was spared, the experience of seeing his village submerged - a place that had never flooded before - fundamentally changed the way he sees climate change.

Pete describes the shock of witnessing floodwaters in streets he’d always assumed were safe, and how that moment forced him to confront a new reality: that nowhere is truly immune. He shares how the village pulled toge...

In this story we speak with Andrew Wells, a retired dairy farmer who now runs a B&B in Kilnsea, a small village teetering on the edge of the Holderness coast. Kilnsea is about 20 minutes down the road from Withernsea, where we recently spent time with a group of High School students talking about the changing coastline. Andrew talks about the ongoing threat of coastal erosion in the area, reflects on the slow disappearance of the coastline he’s called home for decades, and shares how he’s learned to live with the inevitability of slowly losing the land he o...

In this story we hear from Dr Munro Stewart, a GP in Dundee. He works in a busy medical practice which covers a mixture of areas, some with serious deprivation and some more affluent. We walked around a few of Dundee’s parks and green spaces and talked about how improving public health and looking after our environment are remarkably similar. As Munro sees it, the biggest health crisis we are facing is climate change, and the future of public health is contingent on tackling climate related issues, and making healthcare sustainable enough that we can continue to provide it...

In this story we hear from Alister Haywood, who shares her harrowing experience of living through three devastating floods - twice as a child, and again as a mother during the catastrophic 2007 floods in Hull. Alister recounts the vivid, terrifying moments when the waters rose, the windows shattered, and fire broke out in the chaos.

She reflects on the lasting psychological toll the floods have taken - not just on her, but across generations of her family. From her father’s breakdown after losing decades of work, to her mother’s allergic reaction to water, to h...

In this story we speak with Mike Potter in Pickering, a market town in North Yorkshire which was flooded four times in eight years between 1999 and 2007. The final flood caused an estimated £7 million in damages. The town is located at the bottom of a steep gorge which drains much of the North York Moors, so when it came to building concrete wall defences in 2007, the cost was estimated to be around £20 million, which the authorities could not justify by the size of population to be protected from flooding. There were calls for proposals for alternative means of addressing the fl...

Sarah Harris-Smith and three of her students at Withernsea High School describe the impacts of the rapidly changing coastline on their future.

In this story we speak with Sarah Harris-Smith - a geography teacher at Withernsea High School - and three of her students: Harvey Taylor, Trystan Young and Charles Graham. Sarah has been teaching at Withernsea High School for 25 years. As a geography teacher it is a particularly interesting place to work because it sits on the Holderness coast in Yorkshire, which is the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe. On average, it loses 2 metres a year, a...

In this story we speak with Andy Charlesworth, the chairman of Tadcaster Albion FC, a team based in North Yorkshire that competes in the Northern Counties Eastern League. Andy has been chairman of the club for most of the last 8 years and he’s been involved with the club for more than 20 years. We met at the ground, right next to the River Wharfe, to discuss the impact of flooding on the club. The pitch was flooded 6 times last year, and has already been flooded multiple times this year. The town of Tadcaster has been so severely impacted by fl...

We went to the South Wales valleys at the end of last year to speak to some people about the impact of the flooding caused by Storm Bert in late 2024. Mill Street in Pontypridd was completely washed out - all of the units were flooded, and since the Storm Dennis damage in 2020 there’s no available insurance. We spoke to Jeffrey Baxter, the co-owner of Storyville Books on Mill Street, about his plan for the future of the business in such a hostile environment. Despite the likelihood of the floods recurring, he’s driven to continue as he loves the...

Angie’s been a midwife in Heddington, Wiltshire for the last twelve years. In this episode, she discusses the complications that climate change can have for pregnant women. Air pollution and increasing temperatures can complicate the physiological changes that women go through both in pregnancy and in labour; increasing the risk of infection, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and hypertension. She reflects on her own experience with the recent flooding in Heddington, how extreme weather has the potential to make access to safe healthcare an issue, and her fears about the future for her daughters.

We went for a walk in Stroud with Andy West. He’s been a paramedic for the South Western Ambulance Service in Gloucestershire for 21 years, and he’s currently a clinical trainer for paramedics and emergency care assistants, so he sees the impacts of changes in weather are having locally. We talked about the affects of overheating on emergency healthcare, and his fears about the future of public health. Like many people we speak with, he’s concerned about what impact climate change will have on his children.

We took a walk with Mike Park through the Buttermere valley, up the Gasgale Gill trail, a path known for hiking and running which frequently sees accidents. He’s been a Mountain Rescue volunteer in Cockermouth, Cumbria for 40 years, and is the current CEO of Mountain Rescue England and Wales. He told us about how the changes in weather are messing with paths and rivers, how it’s more difficult to plan outdoor activities and training, and how more people go out at night to compensate. Obviously that means more call outs to the mountains, but he’s even more w...

This is the last of three episodes featuring stories from Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. For this one, we spoke with Janice Langdon, who’s lived in Stonehaven her whole life. She’s the owner of Molly’s Cafe Bar, which sits on the promenade at the seafront of the town. Molly’s serves cullen skink, fish and chips, open sandwiches, seafood platters. It was flooded this year, multiple times, due to the major storms. They’ve managed to keep going, for now, but it’s taking a toll on the business, and on Janice’s mental health.

Here’s the second part of our Stonehaven mini-series. The first voice is Geordie Mair, who’s been living on the North East coast of Scotland for almost 80 years. He’s living in a tide cottage, and while he showed us around his little garden patch he told me about how the storms have been getting worse and worse, particularly over the past few years. The second half is our conversation with the pig farmer Derek Ambrose, who lost hundreds of pigs in the storms over the last year. He said in 25 years he’s never seen it this bad. Bot...

This is the first of three Stonehaven stories from a recent trip to the east coast of Scotland. Wes Lewis has been fishing all his life. A commercial fisherman for 20 years, he used to fish for bass and pollock on the south coast of England, and for the past five years he’s been catching crab, lobster and mackerel in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. He and his wife Maria run a local business called Seafood Bothy. With the relentlessness and intensity of the storms that hit Aberdeenshire most years now, things are difficult for them: Wes struggles to get out, especially in...

Siriol Hogg has moved away from Churchtown now, and after hearing some of the other stories, she reached out, so we went to talk to her. She was flooded badly in the 2015 flood, and has been active in flood action since long before that: she’s the original creator and chairman of Churchtown Flood Action Group. This is a bonus part of our series about Churchtown.

Rev. Andrew Wilkinson is vicar of Churchtown, Garstang, St Helen’s, St Michael's on Wyre. He talked to us about his experience of the night of the floods, and their impact on his congregation. This is the final episode in a six-part series we’ve been making telling the stories of members of the Churchtown flood defence group.

Andy Walmsley told us his story about the night of the flood and how it affected the community and his relationship to rain. He’s a commercial artist and filmmaker living in Churchtown who made a film about the floods as part of the flood action scheme’s campaign to raise money to construct the defence. Watch it below.

This is the fifth episode in a series telling the stories of members of the Churchtown flood defence group. Churchtown is a village in Lancashire which was flooded from river overflow twice in the space of 8 months in 2015 and...

Roger Weatherell introduced us to David and Barbara Horne, residents of Churchtown and victims of the 2015 and 2016 floods. The floods destroyed £70,000 worth of David’s joinery workshop equipment and took his business from him. Now Barbara is anxious every time it rains. The flood defenses that have been built in Churchtown actually won’t protect the Horne’s home from the river the way it will much of the town, so they are still in a vulnerable position. David also opened up to us about his poor physical health, which is related to working in damp conditions for years.

Th...

Wendy Grisdale and William Robinson - Jim Kippax’s neighbours - invited us into their home to describe their experience of the flooding. They had to move out after the first floods, and again 9 months later when they had just moved back in after refurbishment.

This is the third episode in a series telling the stories of members of the Churchtown flood defence group. Churchtown is a village in Lancashire which was flooded from river overflow twice in the space of 8 months in 2015 and 2016.

Note for listeners:

William mentions 55 dwellings being flooded - th...

Retired engineer Roger Weatherell had just moved to Churchtown in 2015 when the first major flood happened. In these interviews he described how he helped build the first community-led construction of a significant flood defence scheme in the UK. He did it while recovering from illness, which he touches on too. We also had a chat with John Bracken, who’s the head flood warden for Churchtown. John runs a local pest control business.

This is the second episode in a series telling the stories of members of the Churchtown flood defence group. Churchtown is a village in La...

Jim Kippax is a farmer and resident of Churchtown, a village in Lancashire which was flooded from river overflow twice in the space of 8 months in 2015 and 2016. The floods damaged 58 of around 100 houses in the village, so the victims came together and developed the first community flood defence scheme in the country. The people of Churchtown raised £100,000 from charities to build a clay and brick embankment that will defend the village from further floods. The defence was built partly on Jim’s land, where his childhood home was flooded and was so damaged he had to pull it down.

Craig Hope has been a firefighter in the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service for the last 30 years. He is the group manager for training and development for the service and an expert on wildfires. He told us how things have changed over his time as a firefighter: how the changes in weather impacts flooding, landslides and fire seasons, and how they’re all linked. He showed us around the Rhondda Valley, and explained the reasons we are seeing more wildfires, especially in South Wales.

Debbie Wilkins is a British farmer. Her farm, the Norton Court Farm in the Severn Vale in Gloucestershire, is a mixed dairy, beef and arable farm.

Debbie grew up on the farm and later inherited it from her father, and floods have always been part of her life, but the changes in weather over the last decade or so have made things a little more complicated.

Some neighbours have stopped farming altogether because large amounts of their land was underwater for too much of the year. When we went to visit, she showed us around...