The white caravan glinting in bright sunlight on the driveway is one of the latest models, but the appeal fades somewhat when you have been forced to live in it for a year.

Every evening Graham and Jane Sanderson return from work to cook, eat and then try to relax in the four-berth caravan’s claustrophobic interior. Usually their two children, both aged in their early twenties, are with them. They are a close family but they never wanted to be this close.

Arguments start over the pettiest of disagreements. Mr Sanderson, 52, says that he sometimes feels as though his head is going to explode.

A few yards away is the front door of their £200,000 detached home, which became uninhabitable when it was flooded a year ago.

The Sandersons are among 1,400 people in Hull, East Yorkshire, who were forced to swap their homes for caravans when the rising waters did their worst last June. In total, 7,000 homes were flooded.

In a cramped, rented flat elsewhere in the city you will find Lisa Stokes and her partner, Tim Saxon, a police constable, both aged 29 and enduring the most “soul-destroying” 12 months of their lives.

Ms Stokes, a fire brigade control room supervisor, spent the night of the floods fielding emergency calls from across the region. She returned home to find a young boy canoeing down the road.

The couple had saved hard, with some parental help, to put a deposit down for their first home, a three-bedroom house that they bought for £150,000 in November 2006.

They had just completed decorating when they lost everything, including their two cars. One year on, endless problems and delays with their insurers and building contractors mean that they have still not been able to move back and their finances are stretched to breaking point.

They have not been out for a meal, visited the cinema or bought a take-away since Christmas. For the past eight weeks Ms Stokes has been off work with a stress-related illness.

Back in Heather Close, where the Sandersons live, residents are holding a party today to mark the anniversary of the floods.

Though they are nowhere near any river or stream, every home on the three-road estate, built in the early 1990s, was flooded when the drainage system failed to cope with the deluge.

Like Ms Stokes and Mr Saxon, the Sandersons were insured. They survived for a few weeks upstairs, despite the musty, fetid smell.

By early July the caravan had been delivered and in September the drying operation inside the house was completed. The first team of builders arrived in November and the work is now almost finished.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said Mrs Sanderson, 50, who works for a finance company. “You spend all day at work knowing you have to go back to a caravan.”

The Sandersons will not be attending today’s street party. They do not feel they have anything to celebrate.

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