This project aims to reactivate the pierrot show on the beaches and promenades of The English Riveria and South West resorts. The rise of the pierrot troupe or concert party as open-air, promenade, variety entertainment coincided with the rise and heyday of the British seaside resorts from the late 1890s, and shared their decline in the 1950s. There is only one pierrot troupe still giving occasional performances, Tony Lidington and The Pierrotters. British seaside holidays are once more on the rise, but there is no trace of this performance form that once formed a vital element of the holiday experience. Through a series of workshops, performances, and a travelling exhibition, the project will use historical research into, and through, performance to understand the history of this almost lost popular form, and to assess how audiences might understand and value such performance today. \n\nMuch of the pierrot show was improvised and contingent. Only fragmented traces of scripts, songs, and memoirs form the archives held by the University of Exeter and Tony Lidington. By engaging with the embodied transmission of the repertoire, through Tony Lidington's professional practice, and by exploring in practice and in the space of the seaside resort, we can access a richer understanding of the necessary performer skills, the content, the audience address, and the significance of the form in the past. The Principal Investigator, Tony Lidington and four young, local, professional performers will conduct two day-long workshops that will explore what the pierrot show intended to do and what its potential relationship to audiences was.\n\nUsing archive research and the findings of the workshops, we will interpolate material of our own during an intensive 2 week devising process, to create a promenade performance on the model of the pierrot show for contemporary audiences. The performance will tour beaches and promenades of the English Riviera and South West, licensed by Teignbridge and Torbay councils, during the early summer season. Two performances will visit schools with a short accompanying workshop. The devised performance will develop a performative frame (using prologue, epilogue and costume) that contextualises the interaction of the historical and contemporary performance elements, drawing the audience's attention to the performance mode as cultural history. An exhibition will accompany the performance, staged in a mobile booth clad with images and text drawn from the archive, and with a mutoscope showing rare footage of pierrot troupes in action from the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition will draw attention to the contested nature of history-making by contextualising the history of the pierrot troupe alongside other saeside entertainment forms such as black-face minstrelry, and will reflect on how the pierrot show form might already be valued and 'known' by today's audiences, from its afterlife translated into other mediated forms, such as the seventies television variety show, Seaside Special, or the Black and White Minstrel Show, or other narratives such as Croft and Perry's It Ain't Half Hot Mum. \n\nThe workshop process, performance devising process, and performances will be documented and audience reactions will be recorded. Audience feedback is key to understanding how audiences respond to and conceptualise not just the content of the performance, but its process of history-making. Qualitative audience research in open-ended interviews will be undertaken to ascertain audience perception of the performance as entertainment and as cultural heritage, of the manufactured nature of theatre history, and the cultural contribution the project has made to their experience of the resort. Analysis of the findings from the workshops, performances, and project will result in an article, a conference paper, and a DVD case-study for distribution to resort officers, tourist officers, and heritage professionals more widely.

Climate change is expected to result in stronger and more frequent winds, storms and sea level rise, leading to more severe adverse effects on infrastructure such as flooding damage to buildings, power stations, railways and sea defences. The effects of this natural hazard have been frequently seen in recent flooding events in the UK and other countries worldwide. Over recent years, Royal HaskoningDHV has reported that wind effects on wave overtopping has become an increasing concern for the design of modern sea defences and the management of coastal flood risk. This threat can cause unexpected coastal flooding and pose additional flooding risks to coastal infrastructure, particularly in the UK as an island nation. Currently, there is no reliable tool to quantify such risk. Present engineering practice is to either (i) ignore wind effects, which would put protected areas at risk, or (ii) include a large safety margin, which would significantly increase the cost of coastal defences unnecessarily. The safety margin method is also restricted to existing known coastal scenarios and cannot provide reliable assessment of the risks as climate changes. This is a clear knowledge gap that causes a growing concern for the ability to adequately and economically control coastal flood risk. The proposed project brings together leading experts from Manchester Metropolitan University, Royal HaskoningDHV, HR Wallingford, Environment Agency, EDF Energy and Torbay Council to address the concerns by developing a novel assessment tool to quantify wind effects on wave overtopping. Its aim is to translate the powerful two-fluid model from Manchester Metropolitan University into an engineering tool to quantify wind effects on wave overtopping, accounting for the effects of sea level rise. The objectives are to (a) adapt an advanced in-house two-fluid model for wind effects on wave overtopping, (b) validate the model rigorously against physical modelling tests undertaken at HR Wallingford, field data and real engineering application cases including ongoing or recently completed projects with the Environment Agency, SEPA and EDF Energy by Royal HaskoningDHV, (c) build a companion database to facilitate efficient assessment of the risk in design and management, and (d) enclose the tool and database in a simple user-friendly interface for efficient management and control of coastal flooding. Key activities also include visits to Heysham and Torbay for the collection of sea defence data and past event data where wind effects were significant on wave overtopping. The project partners will contribute to the supervision and steering of the project and provide real cases and data. This will be the first practical tool for accurately quantifying wind effects on wave overtopping. It will inform and improve current engineering practice, removing the need for large safety margins to account for wind effects in infrastructure design and assessment. The main deliverables and outputs will be an assessment tool and a companion database. These tools will be used by Royal HaskoningDHV in the flood risk assessment, engineering design and coastal flood forecasting system, by EDF Energy to enhance the assessment of risks of coastal flooding to existing and new build power plants, by the Environment Agency for an improved coastal flood warning service and by Torbay Council for improving the flood risk management and supporting decisions relating to future development and emergency planning. The developed tool has the potential to become a vital design tool in assessing wind effects on wave overtopping, benefiting various organisations such as the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Natural Resources Wales, Network Rail and Transport Scotland for the multiple purposes of planning strategic or investment decisions in management of coastal flooding risks to infrastructure. The project will last 14 months with a total cost of £159k at 80% FEC.

Flooding is a major problem in the UK as recent high profile events in the summers of 2006 and 2007 have shown. In these events the damage to property and belongings ran into billions of pounds and a number of people were injured or lost their lives in these events. Therefore, predicting the location and severity of flooding is extremely important in preventing these losses. Current computer models for predicting flooding are highly accurate, but take a very long time to run even on the fastest computers. This project intends to use a technique known as cellular automata, a model based on the localised interactions of small cells, to simulate flooding in such a way that it will be possible to run complicated scenarios on a standard PC. The new approach will gain efficiency by making use of the fact that each cell can only 'see' the cells closest to it and the project will investigate the best ways of allowing each cell to communicate with its neighbours. The approach will be tested over a number of different flooding scenarios and compared with existing methodologies to demonstrate its accuracy and increased efficiency over standard methods.