The Porter Brook is prone to flooding within the city, because it has been hemmed in to narrow channels between buildings, and passes through culverts that are of inadequate size for storm flows. Sheffield began to research the concepts of de-culvering or daylighting rivers in 2008, but found that while there were a significant number of documented projects, there were very few where the outcomes of the daylighting were critically assessed. They set about collecting such information through a web-based approach. In 2011 they embarked on two daylighting projects on the Porter Brook, one rural and one urban. The headwaters had been culverted in Victorian times, and these had been daylighted by 2013. The urban project was at Matilda Street, and took rather longer to complete, not being finished until 2016.