While the Oxford Mail’s article of 31st March https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23424940.thousands-sign-petition-hinksey-meadows-flood-channel/ on the petition to save Hinksey Meadow is in many ways welcome, some corrections and context for the article are needed.
The article refers to the Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme’s digging up of the flood meadows in West Oxford as a new ‘stream’. Rather than a stream, this would be a channel from Botley and Seacourt to south of the A432 near Kennington, 3 miles long and up to 250 yards wide. It would involve scooping out c. 700,000 tons of earth and gravel from the existing flood meadows. It would not begin to flow until after flooding has commenced. It would be in effect an open drain or ditch.
The £176 million scheme by the Environment Agency, which has been submitted for approval to Oxfordshire County Council, is intended to reduce flood risk in the city, but the channel has been strongly queried by independent experts for its hydrological modelling and lack of efficacy and cost effectiveness, for the risk it poses of water piled up near the new railway bridge at Kennington, and for its destruction of bio-diversity. The petition labels the proposed channel as “destructive” and calls for Hinksey Meadows to be saved.
While the petition to save the meadow was hosted by Evelyn Sanderson from Only One Oxford, it was initiated by the Oxford Flood and Environment Group. OFEG is a citizen’s forum set up by residents in West Oxford who are affected by flooding and who care about the environment. Only One Oxford campaigns for the protection of green spaces in Oxford and the provision of affordable homes on brownfield sites (https://onlyoneoxford.org ).
The Mail’s quotations from the petition are accurate, but it needs to be clear that they are from the petition text, not from any one individual as stated in the Mail’s article. The petition says “Oxford desperately needs an effective flood scheme but a destructive and ineffective 3 mile flood channel through the rare Hinksey Meadows would wreck the local environment and could cause biodiversity collapse in Oxford’s wildlife corridor. ”
The petition also notes that there are only four-square miles of floodplain meadow as species-rich as that in Hinksey Meadows left in the whole of the UK, and that this kind of grassland cannot be translocated.
“The channel would dig up 3 acres of nationally important, ecologically rich floodplain on Hinksey Meadows containing nationally rare MG4a grassland.” It could also endanger the remaining acres of the MG4a species-rich grassland through changes to the underlying hydrology.
The meadows hold historical and cultural value: the flood channel "alters the iconic landscape painted by JMW Turner and celebrated by Matthew Arnold.
“Willow Walk and Hinksey Village are famous for Ruskin and the Diggers who included Oscar Wilde and Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, co-founder of the National Trust. So, it is arguably the birthplace of the modern conservation movement.”
The petition to save Hinksey Meadow supports about 85% of the flood scheme, such as its earthworks and bunds. But it calls for alternative ways to stop flooding, including natural flooding solutions to capture water in land upstream, such as are now used by the Environment Agency for its twenty-first century flood schemes.
The Environment Agency has been questioned in a regulatory letter from the Senior County Planning Officer on many of the points raised in the petition. In response the Agency has increased the amount of off-site mitigation for the scheme, since using the correct Defra calculator shows the scheme in net bio-diversity loss. The Agency has proposed attempting to raise the quality of some grassland around Osney Mead by seeding it with MG4 plants. Experts agree that MG4 has never been successfully translocated and that this is highly unlikely to succeed. (The Great Burnet, for example, a good indicator of species-rich meadows, can take up to 150 years to be fully established).
Independent cost-benefit analysis shows that the channel offers a small increase of flood mitigation for a small number of properties at disproportionate financial cost (nearly half a million pounds per house) and at the cost of bio-diversity destruction in the green corridor around West Oxford.
The choice is not between a flood scheme with a channel or no flood scheme, but a choice between a highly destructive low-benefit channel element of a flood scheme and a flood scheme without the channel.
The message of the petition is YES to the flood scheme, NO to the channel.
HOEG and OFEG have arranged a public meeting at Oxford Town Hall at 7pm on the 17th of April 2023 for residents to find out more about the OFAS proposal and about the County Council consultation which nominally closes on the same day.
To access and sign the petition see here and see Hinksey and Osney Environment Group website here
Oxford Mail 31 March 2023 here
ONLINE AUCTION
Acclaimed environmental artist Elaine Kazimierczuk has donated a beautiful painting of Hinksey Meadow to the Campaign to Save Hinksey Meadow. It will be auctioned online: for more information about the auction and about Elaine Kazimierczuk click this link:
Online Bidding is NOW open until 11pm on 16th April
The results of the online auction will be announced at the beginning of the public meeting at Oxford Town Hall (7pm, 17th of April 2023) about responding to the public consultation on the flood scheme.