Wyken floods

With the current cold spell I started thinking about when we used to ice skate on the Wyken floods (long gone I believe). Almost every winter it would freeze over to about two or three inches and there would often be around twenty to thirty people, adults and children skating there. In the middle where the stream ran it was only about one inch thick but there was nothing to indicate that apart from loud cracking noises as you got near. I am not aware of anyone falling through but the likelyhood of getting out would have been pretty slim. I remember one night when several people brought cars to the edge and left their engines running and their headlights on so that we could all skate in the evening. There was no salting of roads then and on a few occasions we were able to skate in the streets. Does anyone else remember this? Alan.

I remember flooding in the Wyken area but do you mean the "Wyken Slough" (which wasn't even Wyken really!) or the area behind the fire station in Belgrave Road, or perhaps the area on the junction of what is now Binley Road / Allard Way?

If you look on Google Earth at Wyken church and then use historical imagery to go back to 1945 you will see a large dark area to the right of the church, that is (or was) the Wyken floods and you can clearly see the river Sowe running into and out of the flooded area. Alan.

Was this before the big polio scare of 1956 when parents were warned not to let their kids play near the river Sowe?

This would have been in the late forties when the area all around was used as a tip with lorries in and out all day dumping their loads of household waste, this consisted of everything imaginable including dead animals and it used to stink to high heaven. That didn't stop us kids from scavenging there at weekends, I remember once a friend and I finding an old water tank which we launched into the floods and paddled it down the river all the way to Walsgrave where we dumped it and walked back home. Impossible now I'm sure! Halcyon days. Alan

We used to call it 'The Swamp' It was next to the wartime camp (hostel) and the River Sowe near Binley Road. I lived in Hipswell at the bottom of 'The Drive' (the house with a big laburnum in the front garden) We used to play over on the Greenhill where Wimpey built the housing estate in the sixties. The swamp was at the bottom of Hipswell Highway and the road running up the side of the firestation now called Harold Road used to go up to a derelict water tower that the tank had collapsed. We called it the 'Polio Tower' and were too scared to go in the place as the water was supposed to be contaminated. The swamp used to freeze over in winter and shrink in size in summer. I used to hunt butterflies in the derelict hostel in the summer. It used to be where Barbican Rise and Rigdale Close are now. I remember lying in wait, quiet for ages, watching an otter in the Sowe down there mid 1960s We used to roam all day from the Binley Road bridge to where the Walsgrave Hospital is built at the back of Dorchester Way. It was always sunny and warm.

Hello WsG & welcome to our forum. I remember that area well too. I broke my arm falling from a tree in a spinney, the far side of Binley Rd to Hipswell Highway. I knew the Richards family who were in charge of the guild house accommodation site.

Thanks for the cyberwave. Back@U Ahh The Spinney. A great place for riding tracker bikes and breaking limbs. I never knew at the time but found out years later that the holes and mounds were bomb craters left from the war. It was 'beautified' in the 80s by the council. I remember Stoke House but not Guild House. What was that?

I don't know. I was always told that the title of the house that the manager lived in was Stoke Hill Guildhouse.

We called it Stoke House - Childrens Home.

Hi & welcome WsG, I think you are confusing Wyken floods (now non-existent) with Stoke floods. Wyken floods was in the area that is now between Wyken Croft Nature Park & Hermes Crescent. The river Sowe ran through the middle of it, that is how we managed to sail a water tank to Walsgrave. Alan.

Here's the river at Binley Road today