A year after the worst floods in modern British history left 13 dead and 17,500 displaced from their homes, over 800 people are reportedly anticipating their second Christmas away from home — some because they had no insurance, others because of the severity of the damage caused by the flood waters. Many are said still to be suffering from post-traumatic stress and depression. There have even been suicide attempts.

In the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury, where five people died and 1,831 properties were inundated, hundreds of families have spent months huddled in caravans on driveways in front of their properties, protecting what little they have left from burglars while waiting for overworked builders to start work.

Tewkesbury’s formerly thriving property market has taken a spectacular nose dive. Selling a house here today is like flogging shark rides to surfers — nobody wants to know. One flood victim sold her house for £85,000 so she could move up the hill to safety. She had bought it for £140,000. And she was lucky to find a buyer. The new owner has been hit with a huge insurance premium in order to get a mortgage. Anthea Gray of Abbey Terrace, the worst-affected street in the town, has seen her premium increase from £548 to £946, with a flooding excess of £10,000.

Maggie Thornton loves her Abbey Terrace house, right by Tewkesbury’s magnificent church, and had no qualms about moving from London to a high-flood-risk area six years ago. “I expected some flooding, maybe 6 or 8 inches. But not 4ft of water.” In fact it was not merely water that surged into Tewkesbury residents’ homes that July day last year. Imagine a deluge of sewage, putrefying food, floating rodents, insects and pets — dead and alive — pouring into your house. That was what people faced when the rivers Severn and Avon, overwhelmed by two months’ worth of rain in one day, rose 13ft and left the medieval town of Tewkesbury an island, floating in the Gloucestershire countryside.

The townspeople — often accused of whingeing by their luckier, less flood-damaged Gloucestershire neighbours — are still asking why their town was hit so hard. Admittedly it stands where the Severn and Avon rivers meet and frequently flood, which of course has its risks. The Environment Agency blames the changing UK weather, with its heavier rain and more violent storms. But residents believe recent housing developments are to blame.

Maggie Thornton is curator of the Tewkesbury Museum and says: “I’ve seen old photos in the museum of flooded meadows and plains, which have now been built on. It’s well documented. This has been blatantly ignored. Even the name of one new housing development has changed: from the Water Meadows to the Meadows — very convenient.” Maggie and her neighbours believe that with rain from the new developments running off into the rivers instead of soaking into the land, Tewkesbury could flood again at any time. “Every time it rains now I feel like a total wreck.”

Meanwhile the Environment Agency is encouraging communities to sign up to their Floodline service, which alerts people to any imminent flood risk by text message or telephone. But John Badham, a retired headmaster living in Abbey Terrace, says: “It’s useless. Putting up flood defences would be nice, instead of calling up 85-year-olds at three in the morning telling them their homes are about to get flooded when there is nothing they can do about it anyway.”

The government plans to build 14,600 new homes in the borough over the next 20 years, 2,900 in the town itself, as part of the Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS). One local councillor, Phil Taylor, suggests that the communities minister, Hazel Blears, “should stick the 2,900 houses up her RSS”. One feels the entire town of Tewkesbury would be right behind her if she did.

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