It is almost ten months since photographer Matilda Temperley first documented the Somerset floods that swept through her grandfather’s home and transformed the landscape of her childhood. Here, she tells us about the floods’ enduring legacy
When Matilda Temperley was 27 she was faced with a tough choice: continue a career in infectious tropical diseases or pursue a childhood passion for photography. She chose photography and promptly moved back from Africa to reinvent herself as a photographer and fulfil a long-held ambition to learn the trapeze.
“I looked at my ambitions as a kid and couldn’t really think of any better one, so photography won out,” explains Matilda, 32, who developed a fascination for the circus as a child, when performers would over-winter on her parents’ cider farm, picking apples out of season and then taking off again in the summer.
“I broke a lot of bones when I was trying to learn trapeze,” continues Matilda, with a smile. “Now I get to live the circus life vicariously. I photograph it just for the fun of it. In fact, my very first photography job was to put on an exhibition at the Roundhouse in London on the theme of circus – it was one of the most exciting things that could have possibly happened to me then, to have this freedom at the beginning of my career, where I could travel around the circuses for a few months and learn on the job.”
It is lucky for us that photography won the day, or we might not have such a powerful visual record of the floods that engulfed the villages of Muchelney, Burrowbridge and Thorney on the Somerset Levels and brought misery to more than 80 homes – or, indeed, proof that the human spirit has an overwhelming capacity to triumph over adversity.
Her book of black-and-white images, Under the Surface, is a remarkable body of work – a powerful, life-affirming representation of the days, weeks and months following the floods. From children climbing aboard rowing boats wrapped against the cold in hats and coats (“my nephews”, says Matilda, affectionately), to her father Julian, who owns the Somerset Cider Brandy Company, standing in her grandfather’s sitting room, the flood water lapping at his wellies, there is a stillness and beauty to Matilda’s work that transcends the brash and colourful TV footage of the time.
Ten months ago Matilda was working on a photographic project about ladyboys in Bangkok when she started receiving photographs from her mother in Somerset, depicting the rising water levels. “You expect floods to rush away, for the fields to be flooded for a day or two, but not for homes to be under water ,” says Matilda. “It was a week in and my grandfather’s house was still completely flooded. I thought, ‘Right, this is really unusual, this is something that hasn’t been seen before.’
“I came back from Bangkok early, hurried down to Somerset and ended up staying for weeks. Rather than photographing I’d often be working one side of the floods and a friend would be on the other, and between us we’d be driving the press hundreds of miles a week.
“I got completely involved because at the end of the day it was a fight – an anti-Environment Agency fight. They were denying that the floods were any more than some sort of standard natural disaster caused by too much rain, but their own data from the 2013 floods said that if they’d cleared the river as the authorities had done up until 1996 when they took over, the floods wouldn’t have been as deep, lasted as long or had the same devastating consequences.
“Last year’s rainfall wasn’t even abnormally high; it wasn’t even in the top per cent of rainfall in the past 100 years – it just wasn’t significant, and yet we had the worse floods we’ve ever seen (before this year’s floods). The Environmental Agency just seemed to be shrugging it off. In the end, for the inhabitants of the Levels, it was a question of winning over one person at a time, with everyone down here writing letters to politicians, journalists or their local MPs.”
Matilda hasn’t been back to her 99-year-old grandfather’s home since taking photographs of the floods, but she is keen to pay a visit today, to find out how it looks now that the water has subsided. Professor Temperley, who is now living in a nearby bungalow, won’t be coming home until he is 100, if at all. Inside every empty room the plaster has been removed from the walls down to the brickwork, the industrial-strength dehumidifiers have been working flat-out for months. The grand piano that seems to float on the page in Under the Surface (“Water is a gift to photographers – the way the light bounces and reflects off it”) is shrouded in a plastic dustsheet, and when she attempts to play a few notes, it is egregiously out of tune.
A mile or so down the road, Matilda shows us work under way by the Environment Agency to ensure that flood defences are in place ahead of the coming winter. A fleet of diggers has taken out half of one of a Temperley apple orchard to build a bund – a ridge that will act as a barrier against flooding in the future. It’s essential work but there is no denying it has too come late for the many families whose houses are still inhabitable months after the floods.
“Lots of people aren’t back in their houses yet, and apparently two houses had to be knocked down,” says Matilda. “Thorney was flooded for 62 days, with lots of people having to live upstairs for the duration of the floods, but in Moorland, where lots of residents live in bungalows, there was no option for people to live upstairs. Everywhere you can see the effects of the floods – the land is full of weeds. It takes a long time to recover from flood damage.”
Next week Matilda will be re-photographing eight people from the floods for a exhibition by Bath University’s social science unit. As well as shooting fashion and portraiture, including her sister Alice’s fashion campaigns, she has a few other creative irons in the fire – two long-running book projects, “Human Zoo”, which celebrates human diversity, and a project about land and water rights in Africa, a subject close to her heart, having lived in Uganda and travelled extensively in Ethiopia while working in infectious diseases.
“After the floods you want to do things that are more environmental,” says Matilda, passionately. “What happened has made everyone think hard about the future of the Levels. At its height FLAG (Flooding on the Level Action Group) had 12,000 very vocal people. We’ve proved that Somerset is quite anarchical, and if you were to ask me what has been the long-lasting legacy of the floods I would say community activism and cohesion. During the floods everyone really got to know their neighbours. That can only be a good thing.”
Under the Surface is available through burrowhillbooks.com
Main image of Matilda Temperley by Katharine Davies
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