I’ve barely done any serious walking and yet, by day two, I can start to feel my bad knee. My feet suddenly become visible, as does the way they meet the ground - walking on a concrete seawall becomes preferable to sandy beaches and I am surprised by how quickly I am prepared to trade the discoveries of the seashore for the stability and walking speed afforded by concrete. Seventy years ago, the seawall I am walking on would have been sand too. Concrete was not how we faced the sea until the late 1950s, when large-scale coastal defence works were built in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea storm surge, also known as The Big Flood. Hard engineering methods (seawalls, groynes, revetments etc.) began to shape how we relate to the coast, what we expect of it and how we envisage its future. Tasked with stabilising the shoreline, they each brought to the coast their own temporal logics - distinct rhythms, tempos and speeds of change. Walking the coast today, it is clear that coastline stability was but a short-lived promise. Along this stretch, the landscape has been reconfigured time and time again for thousands of years, and while sea defences still cover vast stretches of the coastline, and are in places newly constructed, the beach now shows evidence of erosion and decay, from cracking concrete to cliff falls and deteriorating timber. As Rachel Carson beautifully showed in The Edge of The Sea , the seashore is an unsteady middle, impermanent and dynamic by its very nature. As the speed of coastal weathering accelerates with climate change, walking along the East Anglian Coast is accompanied both by an awareness of loss and an understanding that landscape along this edge is not held together, neither spatially nor temporally. The section of the coast from Great Yarmouth to Cromer consists of fourteen Shoreline Management Plans, each their own version of either ‘Hold the Line’ or ‘Managed Realignment’ coastal government policy. The policy was put in place in 2005 and proposes to gradually phase out ‘Hold the Line’ management approach in five out of nine currently defended sections. By 2055, most coastal defences will be allowed to fail, letting erosion to occur naturally and restoring longshore sediment movements. As the coastline returns to its natural dynamics, more than 3,500 properties across England are at risk of being lost by 2055, 5,200 if we take into account higher erosion rates and rising sea levels; a figure more than triples by 2105. Like a number of other fast eroding coastlines across England, Norfolk faces rapid land loss primarily due to its soft cliff geology and easily erodible glacial deposits. The North Sea’s wave action combined with powerful storms today pose multiple challenges to coastal communities who have made homes on what they thought was protected ground, at the time located far enough from the edge not to worry. This was before time went on holiday, dispensing with the idea that erosion patterns can be accurately predicted and creating a gap between the speed of human adaptation and the pace of landscape change. Recently, the gap has widened - in May 2026, Reform UK, a right-wing populist party, gained control of the Norfolk County Council, announcing on its first day in office that it would review all current council environmental spending. Where, if not along this fast-crumbling edge, will it become clear that climate change is a social issue, and dwindling socio-economic prosperity an environmental one?
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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