Archiving memories of changing flood risk: Interdisciplinary explorations around knowledge for resilience

This article explores the changing nature of the flood archive, drawing on different disciplinary perspectives, approaches and attitudes. It uses a braiding metaphor to map a journey around shifting islands that contain different primary research on flood archives – in expert hydrology, in lay flood knowledges, in capturing flood narratives and memories, in drawing on folk song as an informal archive and in charting archives for a fluid landscape. The narrative and critical commentary ‘in the flow’ draws out interlinking themes, exploring what forms of archive can capture, and share reflections on, a landscape that is increasingly or episodically wet – a fluid landscape? It explores different facets of the flood archive: in terms of fact versus fiction, the changing nature of material archived, who archives, changing archival practice, changing use of archives and future archives. It concludes that informal archives have the potential to form a key resource in communities learning to live with changing flood risk and uncertainty