How high temperatures and Thames Water delays put an East London pub out of action

SPONSORED

Escape the noise with a Sharpham Trust retreat

Set in 550 acres of beautiful, rewilded land in South Devon, Sharpham Trust retreats give visitors a chance to step away from the busyness of everyday life and reflect. With a mission to build a more mindful, compassionate, and sustainable world, The Trust has been helping people connect to nature and themselves for over 40 years.

Eat food from the land, explore the 18th century gardens & parkland and be supported by expert meditation leaders. Click below to find out more and begin planning your stay. 

Plan your visit

Like pubs across the country, the Lord Morpeth in Bow was doing a roaring trade during the World Cup. But it was on a quiet night – 8 July, the tournament’s first official rest day – that the venue was, as staff put it, “gifted an absolute swimming pool”.

There were just five customers inside the East London boozer, taking refuge from the sweltering heat. It was an hour before closing, and when a lone supervisor went downstairs she noticed that water was flooding into the cellar. Before long, it was a foot deep. She went back upstairs to evacuate the building, but the front door wouldn’t open – it was pushing out against the metre-high wall of water that had pooled on the street outside. She called the emergency services, who had to force open the kitchen door to let everyone out.

The flood was caused by a mains pipe bursting right outside of the pub’s doors on Old Ford Road. Around 650 homes lost power, water or gas overnight, according to the London Fire Brigade. The next morning, Thames Water announced that its engineers had stopped the flooding and utilities were restored.

But for the team at Lord Morpeth, their troubles were just beginning. Almost three months later, the pub is still undergoing extensive repairs, and has yet to see a single penny of compensation from Thames Water. “We never thought this would have dragged on for this long,” says bar manager Antonio Abreu.

This might seem like a single story about a pub that’s down on its luck. But after this flood, it felt like pipes were bursting everywhere I looked. Over the summer, similar infrastructure failures caused floods and disruption all over the capital. So I sought out the numbers to back it up, and found confirmed that this was not an isolated case.