Dentist sues after claiming flood defences ruined surgery

It drove piles into the river bed, and backfilled them with concrete before partly relaying his patio and building a masonry wall.

Minor cracks which appeared a year later were repaired and the patio finished, but Dr Honarvar claims problems resurfaced in February 2021, when the flood wall and supporting metal posts began to fail.

In an email of March that year, the dentist told the EA “that the flood wall and the supporting metal posts were falling apart”, and that “the movement in the sheet pile wall continued”.

The court will hear that the failure was probably caused by insufficient embedment in the soft bed of the river side.

The EA admitted in November 2022 that the flood defence works were defective and that there was a discrepancy between the design of the river wall and what was eventually built, suggesting that the current wall was not erected to the required standard.

The alignment of the sheet pile wall exacerbated “scour” around the structure and altered the course of the river, leading to continued failure of the river wall, it conceded.

‘Catastrophic failure cannot be ruled out’

Dr Honarvar, who lives in Tunbridge Wells, has accused the EA of negligence and claims it cancelled agreed remedial work in August 2025 after investigations showed the ground was not strong enough to support piling equipment.

Instead, the agency placed sandbags at the foot of the sheet piles to slow movement, he will tell the court.

He claims that “the structure is considered to be inherently unstable, and the potential of a catastrophic failure in the near future cannot be ruled out, particularly if further river bed lowering occurs”.

Dr Honarvar who also runs a clinic in the Harley Street area of central London graduated from the Royal College of Dentistry at the University of Copenhagen and has a qualification in aesthetic medicine from Queen Mary University.

He states in his claim that a substantial part of his riverside property “cannot be used at all”, adding that “the property remains unstable and has suffered physical damage”.

“The upper floors of the property cannot be let out to tenants,” he wrote. “The property cannot be insured. The property cannot be sold.”