Introduction

Flood House is a temporary floating houselike structure and associated public arts programme. The project is concerned with climate change and explores ways for living with the threat of flooding in the UK. The work has emerged from long-term research by the author into ecological architecture, which through the performative and poetic can rethink the way we design and live within the context of climate change. Projects preceding Flood House include Silt House (2016), Bang Bang House (2017) and Measure House (2017).

Flood House was ‘performatively designed’, working from the understanding that ‘design artefacts – whether objects, materials, occasions, environments, or still and moving images – are inextricably bound to performance through notions of embodiment, action and event’ (Hannah and Harsløf 2008). The performative nature of Flood House was manifest in the event and theatre that was created, as it was moved to and moored at several locations in the Thames Estuary through April and May of 2016. From Dauntless Boatyard on Hadleigh Ray behind Canvey Island, it moved along the Thames Estuary into the North Sea and up the River Crouch to Wakering, where it was towed to a mooring adjacent to the pier at Southend-on-Sea. The structure also incorporated a small weather station, which collected climate data from the specific sites it was moored at. Although the station was operational, the act of housing this equipment should be seen as principally a poetic gesture. The weather station sought to highlight the project’s positioning in the estuary, cut off from the land and moving with the ebb and flow of the tide.

6 Flood House being towed in the North Sea near Foulness Island. 7 Moored at low tide on the River Roach at Wakering.

To help communicate the project’s aims and ideas, a series of cultural commissions and public events were curated by Matthew Butcher, Jes Fernie and Focal Point Gallery. A website provided live feed data on the location of Flood House in the estuary and details of events associated with it.

After Flood House was removed from the water in May 2016, the wooden structure was relocated to Columbia and Brunswick Wharf in Hackney, London, to be installed on public display until June 2019. Although this element has now been demolished, the metal pontoons that it sat on have been sold and reused for other marine constructions. The weathervane attached to Flood House – an artwork by Ruth Ewan entitled All Distinctions Levelled (2016) – is currently being considered for permanent installation on a site in Basildon, as part of FPG’s public programme, and will be included in the 2021 Estuary Festival: a festival of music, art and theatre that will take place at various locations along the Thames Estuary.

8 Jes Fernie presenting the project to the local community at Focal Point Gallery, Southend.

9 Map on the Flood House website showing the various locations that the structure travelled to and was moored. Sites marked from left to right are: Dauntless Boatyard in Hadleigh Ray, Southend Pier on Southend Foreshore and Wakering on the River Roach.