abstract: In this lecture, we develop the local Cauchy theory for the gravity water waves system, for rough initial data which do not decay at infinity. We work in the context of L2-based uniformly local Sobolev spaces introduced by Kato. In this context we prove a classical well-posedness result (without loss of derivatives). Our result implies also a local well-posedness result in Hölder spaces (with loss of d⁄2 derivatives).