The packed meeting in Swiss Cottage

NOT even the strongest storm barriers could have stopped the surge of residents streaming into the South Hampstead Flood Action Group’s (SHFAG) first public meeting.

It was standing room only as more than 100 people packed into the Likewise Centre in Fairhazel Gardens on Tuesday night for the Be Flood Ready event.

The star speaker was Mary Long-Dhonau OBE, aka “Flood Mary”, who has spent 20 years campaigning across the country after her home was destroyed by flooding.

She revealed practical tips for flood proofing homes, ranging from fortifying bricks and doorways with aluminium tape to shoving deflated footballs down the toilet.

Flood Mary said: “I lost my memories. My little children’s handprints, all their drawings from school. I was saving them to give to them for their 18th birthdays. And they all ended up in a skip. It still breaks my heart to this day. Now I swear by plastic boxes.”

She added: “The recovery from the flood is far worse than the flood itself.”

Flood Mary showed examples of her flood-resilient home. “You can stick bricks underneath your furniture, but make sure they are in polythene bags,” she said, adding: “It’s just simple things like that.”

She said: “If you do one thing after tonight, it’s go and buy some aluminium tape. I keep it in my handbag. It stops the water getting in the bricks. You don’t have to have all the expensive stuff if you can’t afford it. One thing you can get is aluminium tape.”

Flood Mary said: “Making a flood plan sounds really boring. So I like to call it a flood to-do list. It’s really, really important that we all know what we are going to do, and in what order, when it happens. “Each house has a different order, because of priorities. For instance, I have a profoundly autistic son – so for me his needs would come first.

“When you get a flood warning, trust me, if you don’t have something written down your mind can turn to spaghetti. Seriously consider that.”

Flood Mary revealed her pet peeve was sandbags: “Let’s ban the sand bags,” she said.

“They are environment-ally unfriendly and they don’t work. The sooner we move on from relying on sandbags the better.”

She said she had carried out her own tests on sandbags in a flood testing tank and that four failed within a minute of turning the water on.

There was a display on toilets from homes in rural areas that had been fitted with a “non return valves”, a simple system that stops flood water “backing up” in the pipes leading into homes.

But Flood Mary revealed: “If you get really stuffed, just shove a deflated kids football down the loo, as hard as you can get it in. You can put it right down there and then pump it up. That will stop the flood water from coming up. And it’s worth saying that it’s not just flood water that comes up through the loo. I’ve had that happen to me too – it’s not very nice.”

The presentation included horror stories from around the country, and showed how important home flood defence systems could be.

The meeting heard that Government packages of £10,000 are available to some victims of severe floods to kit out their homes against future damage.

The meeting was taking place just a few hundred yards from streets hit by some of the most devastating floods in Camden’s history.

In July 2021, hundreds of homes were affected in Camden during flash floods where a month’s worth of rain fell in a few hours without warning.

South Hampstead was one of the borough’s worst affected areas, particularly in Goldhurst Terrace and Belsize Road.

Just before Christmas in December 2022, several homes had to be evacuated around Belsize Road due to a mains pipe burst.

Tens of millions of pounds in damage was caused.

SHFAG has ­com­mis­sioned a detailed report showing the “flow paths” flood water takes through South Hampstead.

This is informing the council’s response, in­cluding rain gardens that have recently been installed at the top of Goldhurst Terrace and Belsize Road.

Joan Munro, the SHFAG chair who got a round of applause for organising the event, said: “Sadly despite lots of extra drainage going in, we are still warned by experts that you probably need to protect your properties if you live in a lower ground floor flat. Tonight is about what we can do about that.”

Camden Council, the Environment Agency, Thames Water had reps at the meeting.

A representative from a company Watertight International that provides floor defence packages, which sponsored the meeting, came down from Runcorn to give a presentation.