Topsy Clinch, 91, Gordon Clitheroe and Kath Grayston are to set up a "living room" in Pickering Beck and take a seat on a settee placed in the watercourse, along with a table, standard lamp and plant.

The surreal scene will be put in place at 10am in the river next to the Beck Isle Museum to ram home demands for flood defences in the town.

The volunteer-run museum at which Gordon is curator was devastated along with 100 homes and businesses exactly a year ago today. It was the sixth major flood to tear through the small market town in the last nine years and caused £5 million damage.

Gordon Clitheroe, of Pickering Flood Defence Group, said: "What is so galling is that the Government could have prevented the latest flood. "It pulled the rug on funding for a scheme of defences put together five years ago at a cost of £750,000 by the Environment Agency.

"We wanted to bring home the point that people here are living on a knife edge because of the Government's failure to protect homes."

A petition signed by 4,500 people calling for defences to be provided in Pickering was presented earlier this year to Floods Minister Phil Woolas in London Howard Keal, spokesman for the group, said: "We've just been given the brush off by the Government, Defra and the Environment Agency.

"Extra money promised for flood defences across the country is a drop in the river compared to what is required. This town is being left to drown."