Ruhul was followed by Maggie Black, a water and sanitation expert, who has worked for many years at Oxfam and is the author of the Global Atlas of Water. Maggie provided a rounded, holistic overview of why sanitation and water issues are so entangled with each other, and how both needed to be seen through a single prism to begin to work to meet these seemingly insuperable challenges.

After Maggie we moved from the developing world and its pollution issues, to the world-wide one of rising water levels, cities and other urban areas, and what floating buildings could contribute to this whole planet challenge. Richard Coutts, principal BACA Architects, leading UK specialist floating buildings studio, sped through a presentation of the many projects and research concepts he and BACA have been involved in, while illuminating for the audience how policy and Governmental change is opening up the possibilities for scaling floating building infrastructure in the soon to arrive future.

By way of complete contrast the water performance by Clare Whistler and Charlotte Still, co-founders of Pevensey Marshes Water Week Festival and Jane Trowell from PLATFORM was a moment of in-breathing stillness in the busy afternoon of speakers, stories and information. The trio had made the upstairs quarters, the octagonal walkway of Fitzroy House, the site of their performance, letting water fall from a medieval monastic water carrier. They quietly sang as the water fell, a grieving psalm of loss for what humankind has wrought on the water world, before descending to the ground auditorium to be interviewed by one of their number, Jane Trowell asking questions of Whistler and Still, about their wider Pevensey Water Week Festival work.