Lake or mistake? The row over water firms, drought and Abingdon’s new super-reservoir

An artist’s impression of what the reservoir at Abingdon would look like. Photograph: Thames Water

It will be like a giant flan case full of water dumped on a marsh, says Julie Mabberley. She is discussing the plan to put a 150bn-litre reservoir, spanning almost two miles across, to the south-west of Abingdon in Oxfordshire.

Mabberley, a management consultant and local campaigner with 1,000 people on her list of anti-reservoir sympathisers, believes the 25-metre-high walls needed to keep in the huge volume of water would be too close to hundreds of homes built near the site to be safe.