Botcherby Community Centre

The Botcherby Community Center in Carlisle was severely damaged in the winter 2015/16 flooding that caused a lot of damage across northern England specifically Cumbria and Lancashire. The community center forms a vibrant part of the local neighborhood and is a key meeting place for many residents within the area.

What happened?

Following this flooding the property remained flood-damaged and unusable for a long time. However, a redevelopment project – the Cumbria Flood Resilience Showcase Project – sought to showcase what can be done for buildings that get flooded, used funding from several organisations to redevelop the building to be minimise the impact of future flooding events.

What has been done?

As a part of a research and awareness-raising project, the Botcherby Community Center was one of several buildings that were surveyed and had property flood resilience (PFR) measures installed on these. They used resistance measures to make sure floodwater couldn’t get into the building (as high as was safe to do so), and also used recoverability (or resilience) measures to limit damage to the museum if it did manage to get into the building. By using both approaches, the community center will be much more resilient to floodwater in the future. Below is some more information about the measures that were used on this building.

The sections below will outline what measures were installed on the community center and will include images of what these measures look like on the building below.

Resistance measures installed

Installed on the building as part of this project are the following resistance measures:

  • Passive flood doors
  • Manual door barriers (fitted inside of external doors)
  • Manual door barriers (fitted outside of external doors)
  • Passive flood windows
  • Passive flood air bricks
  • Repointed external brickwork
  • Passive non-return valves
  • Sealed external service entries

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Resilience measures installed

Installed on the building as part of this project are the following recoverability measures:

  • Resilient kitchen
  • Use of waterproof internal plastering
  • Waterproof internal plasterboard system

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Further Information

If you are really interested in this project, please take a look at the project’s e-magazine produced as part of this showcase project.