Arup’s £12.6M Stoke-on-Trent flood defences: design notes for civil teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
A £12.6M Environment Agency upgrade to flood defences along Fowlea Brook in Stoke-on-Trent, designed by Arup, has been completed to reduce flood risk to homes, businesses and key transport links. The scheme focuses on improving channel capacity and formalising embankments and walls along critical sections of the brook, which has a history of rapid response to intense rainfall. For geotechnical and civil teams, the works signal ongoing demand for integrated fluvial modelling, foundation design for flood walls, and coordination with existing urban infrastructure.
Technical Brief
- £12.6M budget frames scope for engineered walls, embankments and channel works along Fowlea Brook.
- Arup design involvement suggests integrated hydraulic modelling with structural and geotechnical design of defence elements.
- Urban brook setting requires close coordination with existing utilities, buried services and transport assets.
- Formalised embankments likely required stability checks for rapid drawdown and overtopping scenarios.
- Safety case would include construction-phase flood risk management and temporary works design for in-channel works.
- Asset handover will trigger long-term inspection, maintenance and condition rating under Environment Agency regimes.
- Scheme typology aligns with other UK urban watercourse upgrades, reinforcing demand for fluvial–geotechnical design capability.
Our Take
Arup’s role on this £12.6M Stoke-on-Trent scheme sits alongside its recent work on major transport infrastructure such as the Fehmarn Sound immersed tunnel, signalling that its UK water and flood practice is being maintained even as the firm pivots resources towards large cross-border projects.
The Environment Agency’s involvement aligns this scheme with the safety- and sustainability-tagged flood resilience work that dominates a noticeable subset of the 667 Infrastructure stories in our database, suggesting continued public funding priority for urban flood mitigation in the UK.
Arup’s recent internal restructuring, which included almost £20M in redundancy costs, implies that delivering a regional flood defence project of this scale will be an important reference for how its leaner UK teams handle multidisciplinary risk and stakeholder management with agencies such as the Environment Agency.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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