The river
June 25th 2007: It seemed like the rain would never stop falling on Sheffield.
The River Sheaf broke its banks and claimed the life of a boy in a flooded park. This usually small, usually distant feeling river suddenly became a deadly presence in the city.
Sheffielders are fond of pointing out that their home town is built on seven hills, “like Rome”. With these hills come the streams that provided the power for the metalworking industry, which turned a small medieval town into one of Britain’s major industrial cities.
This kind of background historical knowledge is useful, but on its own it can be misleading, deceiving us that the past is a straightforward affair with a neat and predictable arrangement of causes and effects.
That night, when the rain finally subsided I walked along a part of the Sheaf that lies deep in a concrete and stone channel. As I looked at the water I noticed a new metal plaque. It explained how the river had once meandered across the valley floor here, until being channelised with the building of the Midland Railway into Sheffield city centre.
If I had seen this sign before the floods I would have nodded and filed that piece of information in the back of my mind as another interesting fact. But with that day’s tragic events I came to understand some of the consequences of this fact. In the 19th century a choice had been made, by those with the money and power to do so, to impose a sort of order on the river. While this order held it had lulled those of us living near the Sheaf into ignoring it, but now extreme weather had shattered this complacency.
Like a river, history sometimes bursts the banks erected around it, catching us by surprise as the actions of the past unleash consequences in the present. We can shore up weaknesses where we find them, but these fixes will be made obsolete as the climate changes.
We have to learn to live with the water, to make time to imagine how it could change and be ready to change with it. History is similar, we have to be ready to rethink and adapt as it affects the present in ways that weren’t foreseen, or which were deliberately ignored. Attempts to treat it as settled and safe will always come undone.

Background note: This piece was originally written for a history writing competition, as far as I know it was never published. This is an updated version.
