We study the interaction of an incompressible fluid in two dimensions with an elastic structure yielding the moving boundary of the physical domain. The displacement of the structure is described by a linear viscoelastic beam equation. Our main result is the existence of a unique global strong solution. Previously, only the ideal case of a flat reference geometry was considered such that the structure can only move in vertical direction. We allow for a general geometric set-up, were the structure can even occupy the complete boundary.Our main tool -being of independent interest -is a maximal regularity estimate for the steady Stokes system in domains with minimal boundary regularity. In particular, we can control the velocity in W 2,2 in terms of a forcing in L 2 provided the boundary belongs roughly to W 3/2,2 . This is applied to the momentum equation in the moving domain (for a fixed time) with the material derivative as right-hand side. Since the moving boundary belongs a priori only to the class W 2,2 , known results do not apply here as they require a C 2 -boundary.Our second main result is concerned with higher order estimates for the fluid-structure interaction problem. We prove estimates in (fractional) Sobolev spaces of arbitrary high order for the velocity field, the pressure and the shell displacement. This is based on a parabolic counterpart (in moving domains) of our elliptic estimate for the Stokes system in irregular domains.