Report on the Wey valley floods in relation to public health / by the Consulting Medical Officer.

  • Surrey (England). County Council.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report on the Wey valley floods in relation to public health / by the Consulting Medical Officer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    direction to Guildford, being joined in its passage at Shalford by the Tillingbourne. In the sanitary reports of Surrey frequent reference has been made to this brook. It rises in Abinger parish in the Greensand Hills of the Dorking district, and flows through one of the most beautiful of Surrey valleys, passing in its course the pretty villages of Gomshall, Shere and Albury. From Guildford onwards, the Wey meanders sluggishly through the comparatively flat area of the Bagshot Sands in a northerly direction through Send, Ripley, Byfleet and Weybridge, to join the Thames at Weybridge, which it enters just below Shepperton Lock (1). Its whole course, estimated by Mr. Swarbrick, Assistant Engineer of the Thames Con- servancy, with whom I have compared notes, is 43 miles in length. Its total fall, i.e., from its entry into the County of Surrey to its outfall into the Thames, is 200ft., so that its fall per mile averages 4ft. 9in. But, says Mr. Swarbrick, on following the levels down from its upper portion, I find that the fall for the first 10 miles represents nearly 8ft. to the mile, but afterwards the gradient flattens rapidly. The main characteristic of the river is its curving, twisting course and its sluggish flow. The average flow of the Wey was estimated by Mr. Brough Taylor (of the firm of Messrs. John Taylor, Sons & Santo Crimp, M.M.Inst.C.E., of 27, Great George Street, Westminster, S.W.), who put it at about 84 million gallons per diem, but like other streams of the same kind which are fed from the surface (and unlike chalk streams, e.g., the Wandle, which is fed from deep springs) are liable to great and immediate variation, in accordance with the rainfall of the current season. “ During the very dry summer of 1884, the Messrs. Taylors had gauged the flow of the Wey at a point near its mouth, and on the 3rd of July in that year found its volume to be 46^ million gallons per diem. In order to test the effect upon the river of the extreme drought through which the country had lately passed, Mr. Brough Taylor gauged the river on the 14th September, 1898. On that date the flow at Guildford was 20,844,000 gallons per 24 hours, and at a point near to its mouth, 41,337,000 gallons. This last flow is comparable with the 46ij million gallons above given, being the summer flow of the river in 1884. So that the summer flow in 1898 was only 89 per cent, of the volume of the corresponding flow of the dry year of 1884.”