Working With You
Working with you
A vital part of the project is working with and consulting local communities, businesses and organisations. Your views are important. At various points in the project there have been public consultations, providing everyone with a chance to have their say. We will also be meeting with communities and businesses throughout the process.
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429 tonnes
saved through decarbonisation
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7
apprentices employed
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30
local people (FTE) employed
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£6.1 million
spent with local small and medium sized enterprises
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2,370
students engaged on school and college visits
The aim of the project was to understand what the sea meant to everyone involved. A storytelling approach using words and phrases contributed by students and community members helped to develop a sense of place, emotional response and connection to this coastal town.
The workshops used audio and visual materials to explore, through language and poetry, peoples’ reactions to the sea, Lowestoft’s history of flooding and the new tidal walls. These words have been brought together by the poet Dean Parkin.
A selection of the words and phrases contributed have been permanently engraved onto glass sections of the glass-topped floodwall with artwork supplied by Jeff Fisher, the artist who created the cover for the multi-million best-selling book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
Working with young people
Flipside Festival were commissioned by the Lowestoft Flood Protection scheme to work with the community to produce a lasting legacy for the flood walls that will help to protect Lowestoft from flooding from the sea.
The Watertight Words project was established by Flipside Festival and over 1000 school children, along with a number of Lowestoft community groups, were engaged in workshops to understand the Scheme’s objective to reduce flood risk in the town.
Zurich Flood Resilience Project
In 2018 the Lowestoft Flood Protection scheme partnered with the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA), partnering with the London School of Economics (LSE) on the first UK pilot of their tool to measure the resilience of communities to flooding across the world.
The project provided evidence to increase our knowledge and support resilience-building programmes and activities in Lowestoft. Measuring how resilient a community is to flooding helps us to find out what might be needed to help now, and in the future, and could unlock potential for economic regeneration and development, improving the quality of life for all those who live and work there.
View the Flood Resilience Assessment Report.
This work was showcased at a special COP26 exhibition, hosted by Universities UK.