Plant some trees to save a town from flooding? Not a bad idea | Nick Cohen

Towns such as Keswick deserve proper protection from flooding rather than the shabby half-measures on offer at the moment

Walk through Keswick, Cockermouth and many other provincial towns and you experience a dislocating feeling that they are out on parole. The apparent solidity of their homes and businesses is transient. The next storm howling in from the Atlantic will send the waters pouring through them again.

Floods are no longer freak events but expected inundations. You count yourself lucky in Cumbria if winter passes and you stay dry; as you do in the Thames and Severn valleys, and along the east coast and Scottish Borders. Keswick, which I know best, was flooded in 2005 and again in 2009. In 2012, the Environment Agency built an embankment topped by an "innovative" wall made of glass panels beside the river Greta - a "superb demonstration of design and engineering working together", its manufacturers boasted. The wall was meant to make flooding a once in 75 year event. It barely lasted three, before floods hit Keswick just before Christmas 2015.