Living on the edge
Kevin Jordan says he was asleep when his world caved in. Then he corrects himself: “I wasn’t asleep. I can’t sleep, when there’s a storm blowing.” It was the night of November 24, 2023. The first thing he heard, as he lay rigid with anxiety in his seaside home in Norfolk, was a “ringing sound” that he worked out was a section of the concrete road between his house and the cliff edge being snapped off – followed by “an extraordinary sound like a schluuuup.” That was the sand dune supporting the road slipping away. “But I couldn’t see anything until the cold light of day. Then it was shock horror.” What he saw, when he peered through his front window the following morning, was that his neat wooden chalet was within a car’s length of joining the shattered fragments of concrete road on the beach eight metres below.
The house was duly issued with a demolition order by Great Yarmouth Borough Council – as were four adjacent properties on the stretch of dunes known as The Marrams in the resort of Hemsby. Two weeks on from the storm, a band of Kevin’s friends has assembled with wheelbarrows to help the 70-year-old move his belongings out. Feeling like an intruder on private grief I am standing apart, on what’s left of the road, when I’m advised to move inland sharpish. “See the crack in the concrete?” someone says. “There’s nothing underneath holding it up.”
The frangible Norfolk coastline has been fighting a losing battle against erosion for centuries and in recent years Hemsby in particular has become a byword for the misery caused by loss of homes and dreams to the sea. Last year alone 12 houses were condemned and demolished and on the day I visit radio and TV news reporters, along with a few rubberneckers, are on hand to record the latest disaster. But Hemsby is just a foretaste of what’s likely to befall many coastal communities around the UK in the coming decades as climate change causes sea levels to rise and “overtop” both man-made and natural barriers against the sea.
The Climate Change Committee (formerly the Committee on Climate Change) was set up by the government in 2008 as an independent advisory body. Its 2018 report, “Managing the coast in a changing climate”, estimated that nearly 9,000 properties in the UK were at risk from coastal erosion while 520,000 were located in areas with a 0.5 per cent or greater annual risk from coastal flooding. By the 2080s, said the report’s authors, those figures could reach, respectively, 100,000 and 1.5 million, with a further 100,000 properties at risk from “coastal land sliding” (as happened last December [ie 2023] on the Isle of Wight). The report concluded that plans for Britain’s coastline “do not reflect the realities of long-term change, are not joined up and are not fully implemented.” Six years on the situation has, if anything, got worse.
Responsibility for managing our sea-threatened beaches and cliffs lies with local authorities and the Environment Agency (EA), part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. They develop Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs) that recommend one of four policies for any given stretch of coastline: “hold the line”, ie do what it takes to maintain defences; “managed realignment”, ie retreating from the erosion, which may involve sacrificing buildings along the way; “advance the line”, ie build out towards the sea; and “no active intervention”.
Each policy is based on a calculation that determines the BCR (benefit:cost ratio) between the cost of any proposed work and the damage that would result if the work did not go ahead. So the more at-risk properties there are, the more likely it is that plans and funds will be forthcoming to protect them. But even if money and resources were no object, the idea of continuing to throw up barriers on every stretch of coastline where human habitation is threatened is neither wise nor feasible.
Studying the effects of coastal erosion and how best to manage them is the specialist area of Gerd Masselink, a Professor in Coastal Geomorphology at the University of Plymouth. “For Britain, coastal erosion is almost the default, because it’s an island,” he tells me. “Eroding cliffs produce sand and gravel that go to other bits of coast so if you fix the cliff in place you stop it from feeding this coastal ‘transport system’.” So you may succeed in halting or delaying erosion in one place - but it will just occur elsewhere. And as sea levels rise and the impact of storms increases the government will prioritise “hotspots”. He cites Looe in Cornwall, one of the most frequently flooded towns in Britain. “It’s important from a tourism point of view, it’s historic, it’s beautiful, a lot of people live there. So they’re now getting a mini storm surge barrier. But people living in other places will be abandoned.”
One such place is Climping on the south coast. This privately-owned beach is one of the last undeveloped stretches of shoreline in Sussex thanks to historic covenants that prohibit the building of new houses or caravan parks. “It’s been like heaven here, you wouldn’t find another spot like it,” says Lin Lundie, 83, who lives in Atherington Farm, a cluster of old buildings just behind the beach, with her 82-year-old husband Henry Burrell. The couple have hosted many poetry and meditation workshops here but the current atmosphere is anything but contemplative. In the last five years a series of storm surges has battered Climping’s protective wooden groynes and concrete sea defences. In 2020 and 2023 the sea flooded more than 1km inland. In the process the idyllic backwater of Climping has been changed beyond recognition. The car park and cafe had to be closed for good last summer [2023] while the beach itself, in the description of one local resident, “looks as if it’s been carpet-bombed”. In the eye of this storm is Atherington Farm, where the displaced beach shingle has advanced within 10 metres of the flint garden wall and the property itself, so painstakingly restored, is now worth nothing.
In 1992, when Lin Lundie and Henry Burrell bought their home, the danger of coastal erosion or flooding was not an issue. Lin says the first they knew that they may have a problem was in 2009 when she encountered an officer from the EA on the beach who told her that her property might not be there in ten years’ time. “I’ve not had a peaceful night since then,” she told me in the elegant surroundings of her high-ceilinged front room. “You can pretend – you can have beautiful days and lovely summers. But all the time there’s the nagging threat.”
Climping Beach and its hinterland have few at-risk properties to boost its BCR number, precisely because those restrictive covenants have prevented development – an irony not lost on the local farmer, James Baird, whose family are the landowners. “Had it been developed there would have been justification for the investment in the coast and you wouldn’t see the erosion,” he says. His family took the EA to the High Court three times between 2009 and 2015 over the Agency’s responsibility to maintain parts of the shoreline. “We’ve since settled with the EA but I can’t say on what terms – we’ve had to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement,” he says.
Since 2015 the EA has implemented what it describes as “a reactive patch and repair regime” but this will remain in place only “for as long as it remains economically sustainable and technically practical”. The EA’s Asset Performance Team Leader, John Parsonage, acknowledges that “at some point in the future, the impacts of climate change will require different approaches.” Repairs are now confined to bulldozing shingle around to bolster the crumbling flood defences. But the waves are relentlessly pushing the beach north, ever nearer Atherington Farm and across a section of the tarmac road called Mill Lane that runs behind and parallel to the beach.
Mill Lane is the sole access road for the grade II listed Climping Mill, bought by entrepreneur and former actor Gary Love in 2017. He envisaged it as a retreat for his extended family but it is now accessible only by a 4x4, and that’s on a good day. “No fire engine can get here,” he says. “No post. No bin lorries. God forbid we need an ambulance for any reason.” Located in the most populous corner of the UK, Love’s home feels remoter than a Hebridean island. He says “you couldn’t print” what he thinks of the EA, which has an annual repair budget of “around £20,000” for the 3.5kms of shoreline at Climping. Two years ago Love took matters into his own hands and spent £1.2 million on sea defences just for the Mill. The result is 2.4 metre high steel stockade around his property that he likens to something out of Thunderbirds. “We’re totally safe in here,” he says, adding: “until the big one comes.”
James Baird says that “if you buy by the coast it’s ‘buyer beware’.” He has scant sympathy for those now at risk, especially if they bought after 2015 “when the EA spelt out what was going to happen”. His farm has lost nine acres of productive land to the sea so far but he has decided to embrace change rather than fight it. He produces a map from 1606 on which he says the shoreline at Climping is about 300 metres south of where it is now. “It shows you that erosion is ongoing so should the rest of us in perpetuity continue to hold the shore in that position?” he asks. As flooding carries the seeds of salt marsh plants further inland he says he is powerless to prevent 200 of his 1,300 acres turning into marshland. His solution is to incorporate it into a county-wide rewilding project he has been instrumental in setting up called Weald to Waves, aimed at creating a 160km-long “nature recovery corridor” across Sussex. Meanwhile feelings are running high in Climping. Gary Love calls it “the village of pain” and Hamish Neathercoat, a local resident who set up the Save Clymping from the Sea campaign group, tells me “it’s no secret that what’s gone on on Climping Beach has polarised the community.”
In Hemsby the policy of the SMP is “managed realignment”. Early last year, to the relief of residents on The Marrams, plans to build a 1.3km-long rock “berm” (bank) on the beach to protect the resort were given the final go-ahead. But while planning permission was going through the scheme doubled in price, from £10 million to £20 million. At the lower price it could have attracted a contribution from central government but it is now too expensive to be deemed viable and in any case the funding shortfall would have to be made up by the local authority – extremely unlikely in this time of inflation and budget squeezes. As an emergency measure an 80-metre-long rock “shield” has been put in place and is making a difference in the small area it covers. But those at risk feel they’re living in a world of empty promises and buck-passing.
“We’re not dealing with people who care,” says Simon Measures, a web designer who chairs the Save Hemsby Coastline campaign group and whose own house is in peril. “We feel we’re being picked off one by one. There doesn’t seem to be anyone at any level to come up with a solution.” As in Climping the mood in the community has turned “really nasty,” he says. “You can only suppose it’s how people internalise fear and anger, having no channel to get rid of it.”
At the end of last month [ie January] Measures and other Hemsby campaigners handed in a petition of nearly 17,000 signatures to 10 Downing Street urging the government to re-think its criteria for funding sea defences. They argue that through tourism the resort generates £80 million annually for the economy of Norfolk – a benefit that is not factored into current calculations.
Among professionals working with the impact of coastal erosion and flooding there is a feeling that responses and legislation are now lagging far behind what’s needed. Karen Thomas, the Head of Coastal Partnership East, representing three councils in Norfolk and Suffolk with responsibility for coastal communities, highlights the “significant difference” between the treatment of those living on river flood plains and those in vulnerable coastal locations. “If you’re at flood risk there’s a flood risk map and when you buy a property estate agents are obliged to tell you of any risk in your searches,” she says. No such obligation exists in the case of coastal erosion. There is also a government-backed insurance package called Flood Re for flood-plain dwellers but nothing for those in coastal erosion hotspots, whose houses eventually become unsellable with their values dropping to zero. “There isn’t a requirement to compensate from a government department perspective…. because it’s considered to be a natural event,” says Karen Thomas. To add insult to injury, says Professor Masselink, “if you let your house fall into the sea from a cliff you get fined and you are responsible for clearing up the rubbish as well. So it’s a double whammy. That’s not right.”
It’s the sheer speed of change that has caught everybody out. Kevin Jordan downsized to his chalet on the The Marrams 14 years ago for a life of “simple tranquillity”, having worked in the oil and gas industries developing the technology for submersibles and ROVs (remote operated vehicles). He says the North Sea was then a distant view through gaps in the dunes. “Before I bought the place I had a lot of colleagues who were hydrographic engineers and surveyors and I asked for their opinion,” he tells me. “They looked on the maps, they looked at all the data, and they said, well we think you’ve probably got about a hundred years there before the sea gets to your property.”
He is currently a co-claimant in a case being brought by the environmental group Friends of the Earth challenging the latest National Adaptation Programme – which sets out the government’s response to climate change – on the grounds that it breaches the claimants’ human rights, in Jordan’s case by not protecting his home. Meanwhile he is being rehoused by the council in emergency accommodation. “You walk out with what’s in your pocket and your bank balance – that’s it,” says Simon Measures of Save Hemsby Coastline. This is the prospect facing long-term Climping residents Henry Burrell and Lin Lundie, who have no savings beyond the now-vanished value of their property. “We have actually thought about just taking some pills and going to bed and holding hands,” Henry says quietly.
Gerd Masselink acknowledges the “human cost” of making tough decisions on sea defences. “There are families that have lived on the coast for a very long time with a very long front garden and now it’s all disappearing,” he says. “I have sympathy for that, especially when the erosion is a result of something else happening along the coast.” (In Climping some residents believe that offshore breakwaters protecting 350 houses at Elmer, to the west, have made things worse for them – a claim for which the EA says there is “no evidence”.) Masselink’s other concern is that lessons aren’t being learned and there will be many more people having to walk away from worthless homes.
“We should avoid burdening future generations with the same problems we’re dealing with now,” he says. But that isn’t happening because the solution – not to build in at-risk coastal areas – is perceived as “anti-development”, especially at a time of chronic housing shortages. “We [in the UK] are very reactive about these sorts of things,” Masselink says. “We’re not like the Dutch, for example. They’re already thinking about what should be happening in a hundred years’ time. We’re not even close to that.”
The EA points to a £36 million pilot project called the Coastal Transition Accelerator Programme which is being implemented over the next five years in North Norfolk and the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, the latter being the fastest eroding stretch of coast in Europe. The idea is “to explore innovative approaches of adapting to the effects of coastal erosion” but any recommendations or initiatives that may result from its findings – such as the relocation of at-risk properties and compensation for homeowners – remain years away. Too late for the likes of Lin Lundie, Henry Burrell and Kevin Jordan.
Back at Jordan’s chalet in Hemsby two of his friends are manoeuvring his washing machine down the front steps. Looking shellshocked, Kevin is checking the contents of the boxes in the wheelbarrows. Tomorrow a big yellow digger with a wrecking claw will scrunch his home to smithereens in a matter of minutes. I ask him if he’ll be having a quiet moment in its emptied rooms before leaving for the last time. He shakes his head. “I’m not an emotional person,” he says.
Published in the Telegraph Magazine on February 10, 2024
