Waking up to the day Chorlton was flooded .............. the Brook on an August morning

Now I know I shouldn’t have been surprised at seeing pictures of the Brook overflowing its banks earlier last month.

They were posted on social network by Michael J Thompson who wrote , “we had a substantial amount of rain overnight just before the flooding which led to the Chorlton Brook overflowing its banks into the northern part of Chorlton Park. 

Even the area in the park where the pond used to be filled up with water, having been bone dry the day before. 

The trams to the airport where stopped for a while due to the overnight flooding, and there was further flooding near Firswood which led to suspension of all services for a while between the Airport, Didsbury and Trafford Bar. 

I believe the Airport trams continued to run between Sale Water Park and the Airport. Most of the water had subsided by the afternoon.”

Looking at them under an Italian sun was to be reminded that we should never take our rivers and water courses for granted.

Certainly those who lived here in the 19th century maintained a healthy respect for them, for they not only offered water for drinking, cooking and irrigating the land but could flood with little warning.

In the case of the Mersey such floods could create a lake 3 miles wide across what we now call the meadows and one particularly fierce inundation swept away the weir in the bend of the river which had been built to protect the Duke’s Canal.

Even now there are plenty of winters when the Mersey comes close to topping those high banks which have been constructed over the centuries.

And there are plenty of pictures in the collection of the Brook coming close to overflowing its banks which is not surprising given that by the time it reaches Chorlton it is the sum of a number of smaller water courses of which the Gore Brook and the Red Lion are only two.

All of which brings me back to Michael’s photographs of a day when the brook offered up that reminder of how we should never take it or the other water courses for granted.

Pictures’ Chorlton Brook, August, 2015, courtesy of Michael J Thompson, Hardy Productions UK, http://hardyproductionsuk.com/

*Chorlton rivers, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20rivers