A £50million bid to tackle Southend’s flooding problems could see City Beach transformed into a “green oasis” with rain gardens and a small stream alongside added greenery and canopies.

Anglian Water is seeking the funding from the Water Services Regulation Authority, Ofwat, to kick start schemes across the city aimed at preventing rain water from overwhelming sewers during downpours.

The water company unveiled its plans at special place scrutiny meeting on Monday, which would see a £2.1million slice of the funding earmarked for the flood-prone City Beach area in Marine Parade.

Councillors heard a consultation is due to start at end of January and aims to make the area resilient to climate change.

A “sustainable” drainage system will be capable of storing 400,000 litres of water in attenuation tanks. Existing planters will be converted into a series of connected rain gardens and hydro-rocks will absorb water, with most of the system hidden underground.

A “rill” - which would be a small brook or stream - would run through the middle of the area as a running water feature.

The plans also include more greenery and canopies to help ward off the heat in summer.

Anglian Water said solutions to flooding in homes off Thorpe Hall Avenue and Thorpe Hall Close were also being looked at as part of the scheme.

Matthew Moore Anglian Water’s flood risk manager said: “We’ve seen quite a lot of flooding in Thorpe Hall Avenue since October and November. The root cause is surface water getting into the foul sewer networks and mixed with higher than normal tides. We’ve got a long sea outflow from Southend’s water recycling centre and that is gravity fed so when the tide is at a certain level the effluent struggles to get away.

“We’ve seen recently flows of 3,000 and 5,000 litres a second going into the long sea outflow. That’s significant. That isn’t sewage. It’s about 80 per cent surface water. We see these after not particularly intense rainfall. The sheer amount of overflow we have to deal with means this is not going to be an overnight solution.”

Solutions for the problems in Thorpe Bay include providing sandbags to prevent water getting into properties and changes to the road layout to redirect water away from homes.

Up to “400,000 will spent on a pilot scheme in Fairmead Avenue, Westcliff, to fit “smart water butts”. Following a consultation, the plan is to divert roof water into the butts which automatically empty into gardens so they can refill during a downpour.

Anglian Water is set to install 22,000 sewer monitors in high risk locations by 2025 with many of 297 planned for Southend already alerting the company to 105 blocked pipes.