Floods in the Thames Valley

Hauntingly beautiful images of flooded rural Surrey

There's a truly ghostly beauty to these newsreel images of horse-drawn coaches navigating flooded roads on a misty morning in the Thames Valley around Windsor. Even given the picture-perfect conditions, Topical Budget's (unidentified) cameraman excelled himself here, conjuring gothic images worthy of Bram Stoker or Arthur Conan Doyle. For the locals, though, the high waters meant nothing but heartache and inconvenience.

The only clue to the precise location of these shots is a brief glimpse of a footpath to Egham, as two men, one of them a soldier, cautiously climb a stile half-buried by a collapsed tree. This part of Surrey is still all-too-familiar with flooding - Egham found itself in the news again for all the wrong reasons in February 2014, when an overflowing Thames forced many residents out of their homes.