27/07/2026
One of the chapters from the book I'm writing, this one is chapter 29, you'll have to wait till I've finsihed before you get the read the rest of it,
Enjoy.
A Thousand Years of Weather
People often ask whether we worry about flooding, which is understandable when they first visit and realise just how close we live to the Great Ouse. From the top of the bank the river seems to occupy the entire landscape, particularly at high tide when the mud disappears and the water rises until it looks almost level with the land on either side. Visitors stand there looking towards it, then towards the house, and eventually ask the question they have clearly been thinking about since they arrived.
“Has the river ever flooded you?”
The answer is no. In all the years we have lived here, the Great Ouse has never flooded the house or The Solar Shed. The Environment Agency bank does exactly what it was built to do, holding back a tidal river that rises and falls twice a day only a few yards from our garden. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been flooded, though. We have, several times. The water simply came from the opposite direction.
It came from the sky.
That is the strange thing about living beside a river. Everyone watches the river because it is the obvious threat, while the rain quietly lands behind you. During the worst of the summer storms, an enormous amount of water can fall in a very short period, and once the ground is dry, baked hard and unable to absorb it, that water has to go somewhere. In our case it runs across the garden towards the lowest point, which unfortunately happens to be the two-hundred-year-old brick building from which I have spent most of my working life talking about renewable energy, climate resilience and sensible ways of adapting our homes.
There is a certain irony in standing inside The Solar Shed with a yard broom, pushing muddy water back through the doorway while surrounded by leaflets explaining the effects of changing weather. It is the sort of practical education that no conference, training course or government report can provide. You stop thinking about flooding as an abstract risk and start lifting computers, boxes and anything electrical onto tables.
The Shed flooded five times in six years, and every one of those floods happened during the summer. They were not caused by days of gentle Norfolk rain. They came from sudden storms that seemed to appear from nowhere, throw everything they had at one small patch of land and then disappear almost as quickly as they arrived. One minute the garden was dry and the next there was water running along paths, through flower beds and beneath doors. I began watching every heavy cloud that appeared over King’s Lynn with the same suspicion that a farmer reserves for a fox near a chicken run.
After the first flood we cleaned up. After the second we tried to block the obvious entry points. By the third, it became clear that defending the doorway was not going to solve the problem because by then the water had already reached the building. We needed to understand what was happening much earlier in its journey across the garden.
That meant standing outside in the rain and watching it.
We looked at where the water landed, where it collected and which routes it followed. We noticed the places where it accelerated across hard ground and the areas where plants and softer soil slowed it down. It became obvious that the problem was not simply the amount of rain. It was the speed at which the land passed it towards the Shed.
For years we had treated a tidy garden as a good garden. Grass was kept short, edges were neat and any area that looked slightly wild was brought back under control. It was the way most of us had been taught to look after land. Neat meant cared for. Long grass meant neglect.
The floods began to change my mind.
We allowed parts of the grass to grow longer, partly because longer vegetation slowed the surface water and partly because, after the fifth flood, I was willing to try almost anything that did not involve building a concrete wall around the office. The difference was noticeable. Water moved more slowly, more of it soaked into the soil and less arrived at the Shed all at once.
Then other things began to happen.
Wildflowers appeared in places where they had never been allowed to flower before. Bees arrived, followed by more butterflies and insects. Birds began feeding in areas that had once been little more than closely cut lawn. The garden became less orderly but far more alive, and what had begun as an attempt to manage rainwater became something much wider.
I have never been against neat gardens. People should do what makes them happy with the space they have. I simply began to question why we had become so determined to remove every untidy corner from nature. A lawn cut within an inch of its life may look smart, but it does very little for wildlife and, during periods of extreme heat, it quickly becomes a dry yellow surface that sheds heavy rain almost as effectively as a paved drive.
Longer grass keeps the soil cooler. Its roots reach deeper. It holds water for longer during dry periods and slows it during sudden downpours. It provides shelter and food for insects, which in turn support birds and other wildlife. None of this required an expensive technology or a government grant. It required us to stop cutting a few areas quite so often.
That experience changed the way I began talking to customers and visitors about resilience. Solar panels and batteries were still important, but increasingly I found myself talking about the whole property. Where did the rain go? Could it be collected? Could it be slowed down? Was the garden helping or hindering? Were there trees providing shade? Could water butts reduce the amount entering drains during a storm and provide irrigation during the dry weeks that followed?
These were not especially complicated questions, but they reflected a pattern I had been noticing for years. We were experiencing longer dry spells interrupted by heavier bursts of rain. The same summer could bring water shortages and flash flooding, sometimes within weeks of each other. That sounds contradictory until you understand that the problem is not simply how much rain falls over a year, but when it falls and how quickly.
The garden gradually became one of the most useful demonstrations at The Solar Shed. Customers often arrived expecting to discuss panels, batteries and inverters, but by the time they left we had also talked about rainwater collection, food growing, composting, insulation, shade and the small changes that make a home better able to cope with whatever the weather decides to do next.
I never intended the place to become a lesson in climate adaptation. It simply developed that way because we were trying to solve real problems in the place where we lived and worked.
Around the same time, the Environment Agency began substantial works to the flood bank beside our property. Watching those works unfold gave me a new appreciation of the scale of the engineering that allows communities like ours to exist alongside tidal rivers. The bank is easy to take for granted because it looks like part of the landscape, covered in grass and walked by people who rarely give much thought to what lies beneath their feet. In reality, it is a piece of essential infrastructure protecting homes, farmland and roads from a river that would otherwise reclaim much of the surrounding area.
The works were disruptive at times, as major civil engineering usually is, but they were also fascinating. Sections of bank were strengthened, access improved and the defences brought up to the standard needed for the years ahead. Heavy machinery moved along the river while the tide continued rising and falling as if none of it were happening.
The river did not care that engineers were working beside it. It simply kept its timetable.
Living here has made me very aware that the Fens are not naturally dry land. Much of the landscape around us exists because generations of people have drained, banked, pumped and managed water. The straight ditches, raised roads, pumping stations and embankments are not incidental features. They are the reason villages, farms and businesses can exist here at all.
I knew that in a general sense, but I did not fully understand how deep that history went until I was given a documented timeline of Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen stretching back to 1066.
A thousand years of village history sounds, at first, as though it should be a record of kings, landowners, churches and notable families. There is plenty of that, of course. The church appears repeatedly, as do changes of monarch, ownership, boundaries and the ordinary milestones of village life. Yet as I began reading through the records, another story emerged beneath the names and dates.
It was the story of water.
There were floods, broken banks, marshes, drainage works, lost harvests, severe winters and repeated efforts to protect the land. People repaired what the weather damaged, strengthened banks after they failed and dug channels to carry water away. Crops were lost, livestock suffered and families endured conditions that would have tested even the strongest communities.
The language was often simple and matter-of-fact. There was no dramatic explanation of climate, no argument about cause and no expectation that somebody in authority would arrive and make everything right. A flood happened. A bank broke. A harvest failed. Repairs were made. Life continued.
Reading those records beside the same river was a strangely moving experience. The people named in them had walked the same ground, watched the same tides and worried about the same water, even though almost every other part of their lives would be unrecognisable to us. They had no weather apps, satellite forecasts or Environment Agency alerts. They watched the sky, the wind, the river and the behaviour of animals because those were the information systems available to them.
I began to realise that the village timeline was also a thousand-year record of adaptation.
Each generation inherited land shaped by the work of the generation before it. A ditch dug centuries ago might still influence where water flows today. A bank repaired after an ancient flood may have been strengthened and rebuilt many times, but it remains part of the same long effort to hold the river in its place and keep the land usable.
We sometimes speak about adaptation as though it were a new response to a modern problem. The word appears in policy documents, climate strategies and council plans, but the activity itself is as old as settlement. Human beings have always adapted to the places where they live. We build differently in hot countries, cold countries, wet countries and dry countries. We raise houses where water rises, dig wells where water is scarce and plant crops suited to the ground beneath us.
What has changed is the scale and speed of the challenge, along with the technology available to meet it.
Previous generations in Wiggenhall dug drains by hand. Today we use pumps capable of moving enormous volumes of water. They built earth banks with basic tools. We strengthen those same defences using modern engineering, modelling and machinery. They stored food and fuel to survive difficult winters. We install batteries so a home can keep essential circuits operating during a power cut.
The tools change. The instinct does not.
That thought stayed with me because much of my work over the previous eighteen years had been presented as something revolutionary. Solar panels were described as new technology. Battery storage was portrayed as a radical change to the energy system. Heat pumps were discussed as though nobody had ever before tried to use the environment around a building to provide heat.
The technology was certainly developing quickly, but the reason people wanted it was becoming increasingly familiar. They wanted control over the essentials of life. They wanted warmth, power, security and some confidence that their home would continue functioning when the wider system was under pressure.
In the early days of The Solar Shed, almost every conversation began with money. People wanted to know about the Feed-in Tariff, payback periods and what their panels might earn. Those were perfectly reasonable questions, especially when the technology still required a significant investment and few people understood how it worked.
Over time, the conversation changed.
Customers became interested in independence. They wanted to generate their own electricity rather than buying every unit from an energy company. When batteries became practical, they wanted to store that electricity and use it after sunset. When storms caused power cuts, they began asking whether the battery could keep part of the house running when the grid went down.
The language shifted from return on investment to resilience.
That did not happen overnight. Most homeowners still wanted a system to make financial sense, as they should, but the motivation became broader. The pandemic, energy crisis, war in Europe, rising bills and increasingly visible extremes of weather all contributed to the same question.
“How much can I provide for myself?”
That question is not very different from the one asked by generations before us. They stored grain, cut firewood, preserved food, maintained wells and looked after drainage because survival depended upon having some control over essential resources. We generate electricity, store energy, collect rainwater and improve the efficiency of our homes for much the same reason.
I have often said that renewable energy is really about independence, but the parish records helped me understand that independence has always depended upon cooperation. No family could maintain a riverbank, drain a marsh or repair a flood defence alone. Those tasks required communities, landowners and authorities to work together because water ignored property boundaries.
Energy is much the same.
A house can generate some of its own electricity, but it still benefits from being connected to a wider network. A battery can support the home, but the grid remains essential. The real opportunity is not to abandon the national system but to make it more flexible, more local and more resilient by allowing millions of homes and businesses to contribute.
It is the difference between a network that only delivers energy in one direction and one that allows energy, information and value to move both ways.
That is where the history of the Fens and the future of energy begin to overlap. Our landscape works because water is managed across a network of rivers, drains, ditches, banks, pumps and sluices. No single part can do the job alone. If one channel is blocked or one bank fails, the consequences spread well beyond that point.
Our electricity system is no different. Relying on a small number of large power stations to push energy outwards through a one-way network made sense when those power stations were the only practical source of electricity. It makes less sense in a country where millions of rooftops, batteries, vehicles and local generators are capable of contributing.
The future will still need large-scale generation and national infrastructure, just as the Fens still need major rivers and pumping stations. What it also needs is intelligence at the edges, with homes and communities able to generate, store and share energy in ways that reduce pressure on the whole system.
That is not a rejection of the grid. It is an evolution of it.
Perhaps my years in policing made that idea easier for me to understand. The best information networks were never entirely centralised. Scotland Yard could send information out, but the system only became powerful when people in hotels, shops, offices and communities sent information back. The network became more effective because everybody could contribute.
The same principle applies to energy. A passive customer simply waits for electricity to arrive and pays whatever the supplier charges. An active home can generate, store, shift demand and eventually support the wider grid. One property does not change the system, but millions of them certainly do.
I found myself thinking about all of this while reading parish entries written centuries before electricity was discovered. The technologies could not have been further apart, yet the principle was familiar. Resilience is strongest when it is distributed.
The village did not survive for a thousand years because one person solved every problem. It survived because each generation maintained what mattered, improved what it could and passed the responsibility on.
That is perhaps what we have forgotten during the period of cheap, abundant fossil energy. Oil, gas and coal allowed us to separate the use of energy from the place where it was produced. We could burn fuel extracted thousands of miles away and never see the well, mine, pipeline or tanker that delivered it. The environmental damage, political tension and military consequences remained distant from the light switch.
Renewable energy brings the source closer to home.
A solar panel on the roof makes electricity visible. A battery makes energy use something a family can understand and manage. A heat pump reconnects the warmth inside a home with the energy available in the air outside it. None is perfect and none removes every impact, but they allow us to see the relationship between the resources we use and the way we live.
The Great Ouse does that for water. You cannot live beside it and pretend water comes only from a tap. The river rises, falls, changes colour and occasionally carries entire trees past the garden. Its power is obvious. So is our dependence upon the defences and drainage systems that keep it from returning to the land it once occupied.
The historical records made that relationship even clearer. Wiggenhall has never stood apart from nature. It has existed through a continuing negotiation with it.
At times people won a little more land. At other times water took some back. Banks were built, broken and rebuilt. The river provided food, transport and employment, while also remaining a threat. It was never simply good or bad. It was a force that had to be understood and respected.
That is how I have come to think about the weather.
I do not believe every hot day, heavy shower or winter storm needs to become the subject of an argument. Weather has always varied and always will. What matters is the pattern emerging over time and whether we are sensible enough to prepare for the conditions we are increasingly likely to face.
I have seen those changes through the work we do. More customers ask about cooling during the summer. More people want backup power. More households are considering rainwater collection, shade and ways to reduce overheating. Farmers, businesses and homeowners are all asking how they can become less exposed to volatile energy prices and interruptions to supply.
These are not conversations driven by ideology. They are practical conversations about how people want to live.
When I wrote my Lynn News columns, I often returned to the same subjects without consciously planning to. There were pieces about heatwaves, fires, floods, food, trees, water, power cuts, batteries and the way communities might respond. I wrote about events on the other side of the world, but usually brought the story back to the places and people around us because that was where any response had to begin.
It is easy to feel powerless when the subject is global. Climate, energy, war and economics are all so large that an individual can reasonably wonder what difference they could possibly make. Yet the parish records show that nobody ever solved the future in one grand act. They solved the problem in front of them.
They repaired the bank.
They cleared the drain.
They replanted the field.
They stored what they would need for winter.
Then they got on with life.
That is not an argument for thinking small. It is an argument for recognising where change actually begins. National policy matters enormously, as does investment in grids, transport, housing and clean generation, but policy only becomes real when it reaches a roof, a street, a business or a village.
The same is true of adaptation. A national flood strategy matters, but so does the person who stops paving over a front garden. Major reservoirs matter, but so do millions of water butts. Large renewable power stations matter, but so do the homes that reduce demand by generating their own electricity. None of these smaller actions replaces the larger ones. They support them.
The work beside our river is a good example. The Environment Agency strengthened the flood bank because that scale of protection required national expertise, engineering and funding. In the garden, we slowed the rainwater because that was something within our control. One did not make the other unnecessary. Together they reduced two different risks arriving from two different directions.
That is how resilience works. It is rarely one perfect solution. It is layers.
A well-insulated house needs less heat. A heat pump provides that heat efficiently. Solar panels generate some of the electricity. A battery stores it and can provide backup. Trees and shading reduce overheating. Water collection helps the garden through dry periods while taking pressure off drains during storms. None solves everything, but together they create a home better prepared for the future.
The parish records describe the same layered approach, although in different language. Banks, drains, pumps, raised ground, stored food, shared labour and local knowledge all contributed. People did not call it a resilience strategy. They called it living in Wiggenhall.
There is something reassuring about discovering that the problems occupying so much of my working life are part of a story far older than The Solar Shed. It puts our own successes and frustrations into perspective. Governments will continue changing policy. Technologies will improve. Some companies will grow and others will disappear. There will be arguments about cost, speed and responsibility.
Meanwhile, the tide will continue arriving.
It will pass the bottom of the garden, turn inland and carry on towards places where people may not even realise the sea has reached them. Six hours later it will change direction and head back towards King’s Lynn. On certain tides the Wiggenhall Wave will form, pushing upriver as it has done for generations, watched by people standing on a bank built and rebuilt by those who came before them.
I sometimes wonder what one of the old parish clerks would make of the village today. They would recognise the church and the river, although almost everything else would astonish him. The roads, cars, electricity network and machinery would seem impossible. The pumps protecting the Fens would be beyond anything his generation could have imagined, and I suspect the idea of producing electricity from sunlight falling onto a roof would take some explaining.
Yet I do not think he would struggle to understand why we did it.
His generation used the tools available to protect their homes, secure food and make life a little safer for those who followed. We are trying to do the same.
The parish records on my desk tell of floods, storms, failed harvests, repairs and rebuilding. My own records tell of flooded workshops, power cuts, heatwaves, batteries, solar panels and changing conversations with customers. Hundreds of years separate them, but the underlying story is remarkably similar.
Every generation inherits a landscape shaped by those who came before it. Every generation faces conditions it did not choose. What matters is whether it leaves the place stronger, weaker or simply passes the problem on.
I used to think I had spent eighteen years tracing the rise of renewable energy. Increasingly, I think I have been tracing something much older: the way ordinary people adapt when the world around them changes.
Renewables are part of that story, and an important part, but they are not the whole of it. They are the tools available to our generation, just as banks, drains and wind pumps were tools available to earlier ones. What connects us is not technology. It is the determination to protect the people and places we care about.
Perhaps that is why I feel so at home beside the Great Ouse.
The river is a daily reminder that change does not always arrive with a government announcement or a newspaper headline. Sometimes it rises quietly at the bottom of the garden, turns with the moon and carries on upstream.
You can ignore it if you choose.
It will still arrive.
