Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries: Lowland Area Flood Sheets

MAF 271

1894-1933

This series contains maps produced under the Land Drainage Act 1930 and the River Boards Act 1948 to indicate the boundaries of the lowland areas (as defined by the maximum height reached by flood waters) and of the river boards.

The highest known flood and often the name and address of the informant appears on the sheets. In addition to the flood line, a line eight feet higher than the highest known flood level is marked on most of the sheets, and this represented the Lowland area boundary. The index to the Lowland sheets is a set of 1/4 to 1 mile maps. They show in pink those areas which were surveyed circa 1928 on the ground, and in green the areas which were determined in 1947 by map inspection as background for the River Boards Act 1948.

The areas are listed by River Board areas as the index was compiled during the periods immediately prior to and after the 1948 Act. The maps are numbered 1 - end consecutively within a River Board Area and the bold division lines on the index maps show the separation into books where required. There is an index map for the two catchment areas but London Excluded Area does not appear on the index page and is numbered slightly differently, L1-L11. There is a set of maps in MAF 271/1 which provides an index to the sheets.

Public Record(s)

English

51 volume(s)

Open

In its report in 1927 (Cmd 2993), the Royal Commission on Land Drainage in England and Wales recommended that a central drainage authority be set up for each river catchment area. Before the authority was established, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries was to determine the boundaries in each area between uplands and lowlands for purposes of differential rating. In the period between the report and the passage of the Land Drainage Act in 1930, the ministry's surveyors visited catchment areas to discover from questioning local inhabitants the highest points reached by flood waters within their knowledge and to plot the information so obtained on 6 inch Ordnance Survey sheets.