Beavers fixed a west London flooding problem for free

A London council was facing a big bill to solve a flooding problem – and then beavers came along and fixed it for free

A London council was facing a big bill to solve a flooding problem – and then beavers came along and fixed it for free

Until recently, tiptoeing through floodwater to get to work was par for the course for Londoners living around Greenford Tube station. The ticket hall frequently found itself inundated after a heavy downpour. Sandbags were routinely deployed. Nearby neighbourhoods also flooded.

It left the local council facing the daunting prospect of expensive engineering works to solve the problem – that was until beavers came along and apparently fixed the problem for free.

“Even in situations like on Monday, where there was really heavy rainfall, the area didn’t flood,” said Şeniz Mustafa, England’s first urban beaver officer, who witnessed the animals’ handiwork firsthand. “When they put their minds to it, they really get things finished.”

Four centuries after being pushed to extinction in England, beavers were reintroduced to Paradise Fields – a 10-hectare former golf course in Ealing borough – in 2023.

Keen to demonstrate how ‘nature’s engineers’ could make London more climate resilient, conservationists were granted a licence to release five of the animals along the stream running through the land. The Ealing Beaver Project was born.

The animals got to work immediately, reengineering the landscape around Greenford with a series of dams, which created a new lake almost overnight. They even dismantled an old dam built by volunteers and replaced it with a better one of their own. Incredibly, they still had time to breed – producing a litter within a year of arriving.

“I just can’t believe how much they’ve done in a short period of time, they basically said ‘step aside, humans’,” Mustafa told Positive News. “We do make things a little bit hard for ourselves. It goes to show that we don’t have to use heavy machinery or build infrastructure, nature can do it.”

The beavers’ handiwork has not only helped alleviate flooding; it’s also boosted biodiversity.

“We’ve had four new species in the last 11 months alone. One of them is the stickleback, which lives alongside dragonflies and damselflies. We also had red pole, which is a bird that only really stops off on migration,” said Mustafa.

It goes to show that we don’t have to use heavy machinery or build infrastructure, nature can do it