In the aftermath of its latest flood, the town centre of Tenbury Wells was a scene of chaos. The main street was caked with a layer of mud, shop windows were smashed and piles of sodden furniture and wares, all ruined, were heaped in the street.

“On Monday when we came in we wanted to leave, lock the doors and just disappear,” said Richard Sharman, the owner of Garlands Flowers. “We’ve lost about £6,000 and we won’t get a penny back. Six weeks ago we lost about £4,000 in a flood.”

He’s been trading in the heart of Tenbury for about seven years, and became emotional as he said: “If we get flooded again I’ll walk away, and the landlords can sue us. I don’t care, I’ll go bankrupt. I’ve had enough.”

The Worcestershire market town hit the headlines this week when a 57-year-old man drove a tractor at speed down the flooded high street on Sunday, sending a wave of water towards businesses that smashed windows and doors, adding to the devastation.

It prompted outrage, and the driver was quickly arrested by the police. He has since apologised and said he was rushing to help a friend rescue someone from the flood waters.

Locals said they hope the headlines draw attention to the existential threat facing Tenbury – that, without help, it could become the first UK town centre abandoned due to flooding exacerbated by climate change.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it potentially could be abandoned,” said Dave Throup, a retired Environment Agency (EA) manager in the area and a flooding expert. “It sounds a dramatic claim, but people are already voting with their feet there.

“If you keep getting flooded once or twice a year and can’t get insurance, you just can’t keep going on. Without some kind of flood defences, the future looks very bleak indeed.”

In the past four years, Tenbury has been flooded seven times by the River Teme, and business owners said they had only just got back on their feet from a flood on 17 October, when the latest deluge hit.

Tenbury Wells is in a particularly precarious position as it’s a flat, low-lying town almost entirely surrounded by water – the Teme to the north and a tributary, the Kyre Brook, to the south.

The town is often flooded by the Teme, and the Kyre Brook overspills into the town centre when the Teme is full and it has nowhere else to go. It can submerge whole streets in seconds, and this time around it demolished a wall holding back the water from the high street.

“It’s a particularly dangerous flood, because it is so rapid onset, there isn’t that much warning,” said Throup. “With the Teme and the Kyre Brook, Tenbury gets hammered by two separate sources, the geography is unfortunate.”

The climate crisis means the problem is getting worse. The Teme’s flood peaks at Tenbury are projected to increase by a median 20% this decade, even in a scenario with lower emission increases. Residents have also raised alarm at houses being built on flood plain areas.

Most people in the town centre cannot afford insurance – the premiums are too high because flooding is so frequent, they said. Businesses and homeowners have adapted accordingly, by placing all electrical sockets high up, not storing things on the floor and putting in place makeshift flood defences of their own.

But there is only so much people can do, and some have decided this latest flood might be the end of the road.

“With all the stock we’ve lost, plus everything else, we’re talking probably £25,000–£30,000 in damage,” said Laura Jones, the owner of Rainbow Crafts, which she built up from a market stall several years ago.

“I’m going to have a pop-up shop to sell off the rest of my stock and then take it from there – that might be it, or I might be able to continue. But I know at least three businesses throwing in the towel after this. It’s going to become a ghost town.”

Next door, a beauty shop run by Stephanie Hopkins was boarded up and splattered with mud. “We think the business could be finished,” she said. “We put so much money into it, and everything has just gone. We can’t afford insurance.”

Lesley Bruton, an independent district councillor for Tenbury, said: “Businesses can’t afford to continue. They can’t afford to replace the stock, and while we haven’t got defences, businesses won’t want to come to the town. And residents are finding they can’t sell their homes.”

“And climate change is having a significant impact on the rainfall. When it does rain now, it is more intense and heavier. The ground is absolutely saturated.”

The battle for flood defences for the town has been continuing for decades, but would be “the most complicated the EA has ever dealt with”, said Bruton.

It would entail building a wall and series of floodgates around almost the entire town centre, in a costly and complex scheme predicted to cost about £30m – having risen from £7m a decade ago. Half of the funding has already been secured and the government is being called on to make up the rest.

“The prices have kept going up, and the final design is so complicated it has 20 different floodgates. Some of the walls are in very sensitive areas, so they’d have to be done in historic bricks and Historic England has had to be involved,” said Harriett Baldwin, the Conservative MP for West Worcestershire.

“But the modelling suggests that with climate change, flooding will be even more frequent and very much more unpredictable, because you don’t know where the flash flooding is going to happen.

“So we will just keep pushing until we’ve got the money. The longer they wait, the more expensive it’s going to be.”

The government said it will invest £2.4bn before March 2026 to improve flood resilience across the country, but there has been no confirmation that this will include fully funding the Tenbury flood defence scheme.

Throup said one of the hold-ups has been that the high cost of the flood defences is more than what would be saved by minimising flood damage. “It’s not materialised because it’s not economic,” he said. “But it needs to happen soon.”

“We’re only a small town, I don’t know if we can take much more of it, to be honest,” said Tracy O’Mahoney, who lives in Tenbury and works in a bathroom shop.

Five days after the flood, the shopfront is still lined with sandbags and flood defence boards, with customers directed to go around the back.

“We’re too frightened to take anything down, in case we’re going to have heavy rain all next week, and this time we don’t even have that wall,” O’Mahoney said.

“It will kill the town if it keeps coming up, because people won’t want their business here, and those that already have their business here are, quite frankly, weary of it. We need help really quickly – it’s like we’re marooned on an island, and everyone has forgotten about us.”