Orchard: local weather, transport and housing

Orchard Road is named for what used to be there. Through the nineteenth century the road ran between nutmeg and pepper plantations, and the fruit orchards that gave it the name were cleared long before the retail frontage arrived. The plantations went first to disease, then to residential development, then to the shopping belt that now defines the district.

Its more recent history is a drainage story. The Stamford Canal catchment funnels runoff from a wide area through the low point at Orchard, and in June 2010 the road flooded badly enough to become a national argument about whether the drainage design assumptions still held. Further flooding followed in 2011. The response was infrastructure rather than exhortation: a diversion canal and a large underground detention tank, built to take the peak off the Stamford system before it reaches the shopping belt.

That is the useful thing to know about Orchard. It is not a natural high street. It is a valley with a retail district in it, and the reason it stays dry is engineering that most of the people walking through it will never see.