Feral by Design

Leave It To Beavers: The London Underground Experiment

• Pia Williams • Season 3 • Episode 2

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 11:19

London has just rehired an employee it fired four hundred years ago. No severance. No apology. Just an awkward, "Come back. We clearly can't do your job without you."

Her name's Willow, and she's a beaver.

When five Eurasian beavers were reintroduced to Paradise Fields beside Greenford Tube station in West London as part of the Ealing Beaver Project, they quietly solved a flooding problem that engineers, councils and commuters had lived with for decades.

But the real story sits beneath the headlines.

The council's concrete-and-sandbags answer to flooding. The volunteer-built dam Willow promptly judged not good enough. Why beavers aren't dam builders at all, but water managers. And why the human copies still can't quite keep up.

Using a Feral lens, Pia digs into the fascinating difference between biomimicry and nature-based solutions, and makes the case for checking the dusty shelf before reaching for something shiny and new.

Last time, we borrowed boundaries advice from a beaver.

This time, nature's here to remind us that sometimes the smartest hire is the one you fired centuries ago.

Enjoyed this? Check out another Beaver episode Feral by Design Season 1 Episode 2: How to Build Boundaries That Actually Work: The Beaver Method.


Biology: Eurasian beavers continually build and maintain wetlands that slow, spread and store water, naturally reducing flood risk while creating habitat for hundreds of other species.

Principle: Living systems create conditions, not just outcomes. The behaviours that maintain a solution can be just as important as the structures themselves.

Application: The Greenford beavers show how restoring a keystone species can reduce flooding, improve biodiversity and strengthen communities. Sometimes the smartest engineering solution isn't building something new. It's recognising that nature never really forgot how to do the job.


References

S3E02

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.


SPEAKER_00

Hello everyone. I thought after the last episode's emotional heft, and thank you for all of the messages, by the way, we're clearly quite an injury prone lot. I thought after that we'd all earned a little breather. Or should I say beaver? Yes! One of our favourite critters is back under the feral spotlight. London has just rehired an employee it fired 400 years ago. The position's been vacant ever since. No severance, no apology. Just yeah, okay. Oops. Come back, please. We clearly couldn't do your job without you. Okay, so of course it's not literally the same employee, that would be weird. But the same species has been invited back, and it's making waves, or at least ponds. I'm Pia, and this is Feral by design. Her name's Willow, and she's a beaver. Last time, which I think is at the very start of the Feral show, we stole design secrets from beavers for better boundaries. Do you remember? This time it's a little different. Nothing about this story is particularly clever, exactly. It's not a beaver having um a eureka moment. It's a beaver doing a completely ordinary workday. It just happens that the beaver's ordinary Tuesday makes our human engineering look a bit slow and a bit expensive. Several of you have actually sent me this story over the last few weeks, which I love by the way, thank you, asking what I made of it. So let's take a proper feral style look, rather than just nodding along at the cute animal news. Today I'm taking you underground. Literally, the underground. Greenford Station, to be precise. Located in West London in the UK, close enough to still be part of the city's grid, a touch too far for those borough spikes. For decades since the 1970s, this particular patch of London has had a flooding problem. Heavy rain and the creek behind the station would completely overflow, sending water straight into the ticket hall of the tube station. Sheniz Mustafa, England's first urban beaver officer. Now there's a job title I want. Has talked about the flooding impact that goes beyond the commuters. It was people's homes, kids trying to get to school, cars stuck on flooded roads, that kind of thing. A whole community's ongoing headache for decades. The council was staring down really expensive engineering works to fix it properly. Instead, in late 2023, a group called the Ealing Beaver Project released five Eurasian beavers into a wetland nearby. I think it was called Paradise Fields, no less. This was a licensed five-year trial. Years of work went into getting to even that point before finally getting the green light to reintroduce an animal Britain hunted out of existence about four centuries ago. Now, let's meet Willow. She's the matriarch of the family, and by all accounts, an absolute unit. 30 kilos. Within weeks of her arrival, there was a dam, a pond, new channels diverting all the water, and in a couple of years since, a whole network of them. Water that used to rush through the site in minutes now filters down through the dams over hours. So the station's ticket area hasn't flooded in almost three years. So let's sit with that timeline for a second. Humans hunted her kind out entirely for fur, meat, and their scent glands, actually. Then we spent subsequent centuries, and in this case a fair chunk of council money, trying to solve a flooding problem the beavers like Willow used to solve naturally. Before the beavers came back, the council's actual engineering answer to this stretch of the Brent River was to straighten and concrete the channel, force the water into submission with hard edges. That's a really common and very human infrastructure's answer to nature. Control it, encase it, and hope it behaves. Or at least kick that can further down the road a little. And here's the fun bit. When Willow and her family arrived, there was already a dam on the site, built by human volunteers, you know, trying to help. Apparently Willow and her crew dismantled it. Ha ha hauch! And rebuilt their own in its place. Needless to say, this one works as nature intended. And Mustafa is quoted as saying that it felt like the Beavers basically told the humans to just step aside, please. The expertsy here. Now, I couldn't find anything in detail about the way the human dam attempts were constructed in this instance. I was naturally curious to compare what the differences were. But this problem more broadly is definitely something that biomimics have been working on properly for quite a while now. There's a real engineered structure called a leaky barrier. Logs, branches, mud, deliberately built to mimic what a beaver dam does. Researchers at Cardiff Uni and the University of Worcester spent two years monitoring over a hundred of these on a river in a different part of the country. And the results show the leaky barriers work. Not as well as the real thing, but they work. Cheaper than traditional flood engineering genuinely slows the water down. Biomimicry in action. One of the reasons why these tend to fall short of the real beavers' efforts is because beavers aren't dam builders, twist. They're water managers. They slow it, spread it, and store it. And then they listen for leaks and patch constantly. We copied the structure and call it done. Beavers aren't building a thing, they're maintaining a relationship, if you like, with the water, and they're not planning to stop. Behaviors often form a key part of the success of these strategies in the wild. And sometimes they're the hardest part for us to replicate. Quick nerdy note, this one's technically a nature-based solution, not quite biomimicry in its purest sense. It's putting Willow's family back into a habitat to solve a human problem, in this case, flooding. Biomimicry, in its textbook sense, is what the researchers at Cardiff were doing, extracting the mechanism and building our own copy of it. Either way, sometimes the move is copying the mechanism, and sometimes the move is not to copy, but to let the original back in. Stop blocking the door. Let's leave the semantics for now and head back over to Greenford and take a moment to look at Team Willow's impact on life in that area. Nobody asked for any of this, but since they arrived, freshwater shrimp have moved back in, two species of bats, because more open water means more insects, etc., a rare butterfly, and apparently up to eight species of birds have returned. And as for the humans, the areas had a documented drop in antisocial behaviour, which I find fascinating. Apparently because people have started going on beaver safaris just to watch them work. You know for sure where I'm going next time I'm over there in the UK. And to that point, there's now a small tourist trade growing. Out of a job that was only ever meant to keep a ticketing area in a tube station dry. Ironically, the flooding fix wasn't even the point for the beavers themselves, of course. Beavers build these ponds because deep water keeps them safe from predators. Stopping our flooding was never their actual goal. It's just what can happen when you quiet human cleverness for long enough to let someone else do the job. Funny thing about working with nature, she never sticks to the brief. Team Willow wasn't brought in to fix the biodiversity that's happening, or the community engagement, or the tourism. Beavers, as keystone species, create conditions and a whole cascade of good things show up uninvited. Shrimps, bats, butterflies, birds, all moving in because the neighbourhood suddenly got a little bit more livable. And you know my favourite bit to all of the working mothers out there. It's not just the ecosystem around them that's thriving. Cheeky Willow has had little kits again this year. Second lot in as many years. Full-time water management, a colony to run, and apparently still time for romance. Look at a go. I love this whole case study. It's not a fairy tale with big orange buck teeth. It's had iterations and compromises, and it's an ongoing work in progress with really encouraging signs. And as always, it got me thinking. One of my key takeouts is this. It's a question really, where have you got rid of something only to then spend years and or serious money trying to recreate what it was quietly doing the whole time? It reminds me of something I do with my clients almost every single project. Before we get too excited about inventing something brand new and shiny, I get the client's team and we go rummaging through their dusty shelf of the ghosts of past. Or as my grandmother used to say, written around in the cupboards. Old concepts, half finished ideas, things that were parked because the timing was wrong, or the technology wasn't ready, or the business simply wasn't. Every now and then you pull something off that shelf, dust it off, combine it with a new idea, and suddenly it's exactly the solution you need. And that's basically Willow's story tonight, isn't it? Sometimes the smartest solution isn't the newest one. It's the old one we finally realized was worth bringing back. Makes you wonder what jobs nature is still very qualified to do if we just let her. Meanwhile, in Ealing, Willow's still on shift. Unpaid, entirely self-motivated. Nobody's had to send her a single reminder email. Nature! Such a bloody know it all. Oh, and if you've somehow missed the original Beaver episode, the one that many of you insist on calling the Otter episode, go and find it. Apparently I have a Beaver franchise now. Still no otters. We'll sort that out one day.