Let Them Not Sing

About a mile from my home, a row of otherwise unremarkable houses is dwarfed by a water tower, it looms over them unflinching, massive but invisible, a cage for a suspended tsunami. In 2022 I started thinking about where the water in this tower came from - I knew vaguely that our water came from Wales but little else.

And so I started to learn about the Elan Valley and its aqueduct, that runs the seventy-three or so miles from Wales to Birmingham.

In doing so, I began to see not just the aqueduct and the essential, clean, safe water that it provides, which has done so much to enable Birmingham’s people and industry, but the flooding of homes, churches and schools its construction required; I began to see the people it displaced, their past washed away by water from their own land. I began to wonder about the people that live along the route of the aqueduct - their homes right by the aqueduct, ever present but largely invisible.