What ho one and all,

The area I live in leafy Surrey(!) is undergoing quite a substantial new housing building program.

One local 'field' listed on the government web site as flood plain with once in 100 year chance of flooding, will have around 100 new houses built.

The Trust Pilot highly rated builder, Taylor Wimpey is about to open the show home.
Reading the other thread regarding EPC rating, I would guess this house will be B+ or even A. But having watched it being built, i cannot understand how that could ba achieved?

But of more interest to me, is the 'design' waste.' The show house does not have a fire place or stove but for whatever 'design' reasons, it does have a fibreglass chimney. My house does not have a fireplace or stove, and I did not fit a chimney.

Obviously just a sales gimmick. Seems very strange and unnecessary cost, but what do I know?

Surely the mortgage companies now have an aversion to houses built on flood plains. Doubtless the builders have a tame mortgage lender to provide the first mortgage - but I can imagine problems with the the second and subsequent ones. Do they never learn.

In Poland I remember seeing houses built on a flood and they were all built on banked up earth about 1.2m above the land level. The soil was taken from the plot, most still had the hole in the back garden and some had converted the hole to a swimming pool. Of course the plots were about 2,000m2 so the pit didn't notice too much. I doubt that the above houses are on a plot anything like that size.

When I was very young I knew a young lady with a geology degree who was employed by the local water board but who left because of the frustration she felt at not being able to prevent houses being built on flood plains. So there's not a lot known now that wasn't known then and neither has the law been changed much AFAIK. Welcome to UK planning insanity. "The average developer will place a 4 bedroomed home on 1/8th to 1/16th of an acre!"

I think I commented a couple of years ago that there were 'spare' fake chimneys sitting on one of the new developments near us. They're still there, but the houses are moving slowly towards them. The King (nee Prince of Wales) likes chimneys, don't you know.

Here's a piece re flood risk from the US, ( FEMA ) which you may find mildly interesting.

https://www.massivecert.com/blog/fema-100-year-flood-zone-explained#:

Like Owlman's link said - the term '100 year flood' is science jargon which is misleading for most people, it sounds like it won't happen for a long time eg '10, 20, 30 or more years'. It would be better to say '1% rate each year' but people don't understand that either.

You can have 100-year floods in two successive years, or even twice in the first year.

If a new build house in the 100-year zone stands for 100 years, then it is much more likely to be flooded sometime during its lifetime than it is to escape (actually 1-0.99¹⁰⁰ = 63% chance of flooding, 37% chance of escaping) and that flooding is every bit as likely to happen in the first year as in any other.

For comparison the rate of house fires in the UK is about 0.1%pa, or 'a thousand year event', or 9% likely to happen during the lifetime of the house.

When we think about all the building regs there are about fire protection, makes me wonder why we put up with so much higher rates of flooding.

Two people died here in a flood a few weeks ago.

There are usually 10-100 flood deaths a year in UK but there are not separate figures for deaths escaping from houses vs people getting caught up in rivers or flooded roads (as in the last incident) so difficult to tell.

Also, for both fires and floods, there are very many incidents each year where everyone escapes, and just a few incidents each century where hundreds are killed, which tends to skew the stats. A single fire incident tends to affect one house, but a single flood incident usually floods many houses, also distorting stats.

In most cases, the effects of fire and flood are the same, people have to move out and have their lives upended until the place is rebuilt.

Not sure if I am going to get my facts right but I was on the parish Local Plan committee when this particular development was in the initial stages.

At that time, X years ago, the UK gov flood maps did show this field as being in a low risk flood plain and all the locals know it gets very, very boggy. Nevertheless, the borough and county councils were happy to take the cash to give the go ahead.

Subsequent meetings with all kinda of smoke and mirror drawings of SUD solutions (drainage ditches, holding ponds, etc), and a developer request to HMG to reassess the flood zones based upon the fact that there has not been any flooding in X decades, and the maps now reflect that. The field is no longer listed; the railway embankment provides a dam and the stream flows under it to the SUDs scheme. But the land will be tarmaced with driveways and roads, and most likely, gardens will become very very boggy, which will not be a surprise.

But I guess the big developers with a serious bankroll know best!

Now I am looking forward to viewing the show house and hear the answer to, if there is a chimney, where is the fireplace?

Posted By: RexNow I am looking forward to viewing the show house and hear the answer to, if there is a chimney, where is the fireplace?

Fake chimneys are a bit of a silliness to me and I'd not want to buy a house with one - however, the answer is that lots of architectural design elements are essentially "symbolic" and are there because they convey to many people the idea of "house" in a reassuring way. See for example PVC front doors with fake raised panels and all sorts of other things. Even in classical architecture, all sorts of elements that have nothing to do with masonry construction and are remnants of timber detailing, retained for appearance only.

Because much of our housing stock was built in the era when chimneys were functional things, and because much of our new housing stock is built in a "traditional" style, to many people that "traditional" style doesn't look right without the chimney they are accustomed to.

Despite what lots of people will claim, the popularity of pitched roofs on domestic buildings isn't really due to functional superiority, it's because it matches what people expect a "house" to look like.

Sometimes the Planners want chimneys as a design feature, especially in Conservation Areas or near them or just to fit with the surrounding character. But I have no idea why a volume house builder would put them on a new estate. It must be marketing led (like so many things).

The fake chimneys are there for the same reason as the fake glazing bars in the windows.

Yes - the problem is what the artificial facades hide