On a grey, bitterly cold March day, a large yellow digger is smashing its bucket into a small bungalow on the dunes. There is a wrenching tear. Within the time it takes to make a cup of tea, the house is flattened. An hour later, it’s gone, all traces loaded on to a truck, including the splintered wooden walls on which was written a goodbye message from the owners who spent their life savings on it.
The couple, who lived with their two terriers beside the sea in the Norfolk village of Hemsby, became Britain’s latest climate-crisis refugees early last month. North-easterly winds whipped up high spring tides that dispatched waves into the soft sand dunes of this holiday resort, whose population of 3,200 swells to 25,000 in high summer. Four metres of land vanished, leaving five homes teetering on the brink. Nine permanent residents were evacuated, their pretty 1930s seaside chalets deemed unsafe and demolished by the council before the next storm tipped them into the sea.
These newly homeless people are just the beginning. In Hemsby alone, there are scores of chalets on the fast-disappearing Marrams, as the sand dunes are known locally, and a further 92 homes on the road just behind. Elsewhere in Britain, it is not only coastal villages that face extinction this century: major towns and cities from Portsmouth to Hull face devastating flooding if seas rise by 1.5 metres. According to a recent study, 200,000 coastal properties in England are at risk of inundation within 30 years.
In theory, every coast is governed by a shoreline management plan. Most are to “hold the line” – defending against erosion. Hemsby’s is “managed realignment”, popularly known as managed retreat. Stepping back from indefensible coastlines in an era of rising seas sounds orderly and sensible. The reality, as the people of Hemsby reveal, is chaotic and reactive.
“Managed retreat is ‘managed let you die’. It’s managed ‘let you lose your home,’” says Malcolm Debbage. He and his partner, Frances Bolton, were one of 11 households in Hemsby to lose their homes during the “beast from the east” in 2018. “The people of Hemsby are unacknowledged victims of climate change, and it’s unacknowledged because of insurers who claim it’s a natural event like coastal erosion, and get out of paying,” he says.
Like many others living in Hemsby’s most vulnerable houses, Debbage and Bolton put their £80,000 life savings into a modest dream home by the sea in 2015 so they could go mortgage-free and scale back their secondhand book business. Their refurbished wooden chalet was one of hundreds built on vast dunes in the 1930s before planning regulations. There was no “buyer beware” and the couple obtained home insurance.
They were away visiting relatives when the most destructive of a trio of 2018 storms struck. Debbage was phoned by the Hemsby lifeboat crew, volunteers who spend winter helping residents at risk of erosion, and told his home was about to disappear. The crew roped themselves together and rescued a few of the couple’s most valuable books, including an early edition of Ulysses by James Joyce. Books, art, sofas, and all their photos from 13 trips to India were destroyed.
The couple were given emergency accommodation in a chalet in one of Hemsby’s capacious holiday parks. Later, Great Yarmouth borough council found them an unfurnished bungalow to rent in nearby Caister. But there was no mental health support and they couldn’t handle the pain of staying in the area. They moved to a housing association flat in London. “It’s a massive thing, losing your home,” says Debbage. “We’ve been left in the mire.” The couple are still pursuing legal claims against their insurance company and the council.
Five years on, Hemsby’s latest climate-crisis refugees are going through the same process, housed in the same bleak, out-of-season holiday park. But this time, there’s a palpable anger in the community, and a new determination to fight back.
A couple of Fridays ago, more than 250 local people crammed into the LA Lounge function room for an emergency meeting called by the lifeboat crew who outlined a new plan: fundraising to start legal action against the government, and a march on parliament. “We need to go to Westminster and cause a riot,” says one woman. “It’s time to stop talking and take some bloody action,” says another.
One of the newly homeless residents addressed the room. Their home was all they had, and they won’t own another one: their insurers won’t pay out, because the erosion is deemed an act of God. “It’s an act of the devil, not God,” she says.
Certainly, God has nothing to do with it. Hemsby’s misfortune is human-made. The climate crisis is bringing increased storminess and quickening coastal erosion but locals highlight other factors too: dredging sand from the seabed close to the coast, other sea defences disrupting the natural flow of sand along the coast to defenceless Hemsby, even the introduction of non-native species of marram grass, which bind the dunes less effectively than native marram. But most of all, every local blames the loss of homes on the authorities’ refusal to provide hard sea defences, which protect most of this vulnerable coastline but cruelly stop for 1.3km beside Hemsby.
Older residents describe scenes from the village’s 1950s heyday when a second world war pillbox stood beside three vast ridges of dunes. Today, one ridge of dunes remains and the pillbox is out at sea. “Great Yarmouth’s land was built out of cliffs washed into the sea from north Norfolk. As soon as that flow of sand stopped, the erosion started,” says local fisherman Paul Lines. The sand is pushed south by natural currents. After the catastrophic floods of 1953, new concrete sea defences north of Hemsby halted that flow. Its generous dunes started to shrink.
Local people are convinced that erosion is exacerbated by the dredging of sand relatively close to the coast, for which the crown estate – which owns most of the seabed around the UK – receives millions in licensing. “What happens when you dig a hole in wet sand?” asks Lorna Bevan, the co-owner of local pubs and shops and founder of the Save Hemsby’s Coastline charity. “It fills up again with sand. That sand has to come from somewhere.”
The crown estate says it takes its responsibility seriously and that licences can be withdrawn by the regulator, the Marine Management Organisation, if found to be having any unexpected impacts. “Any activity relating to the extraction of marine sand and gravel is carefully regulated, and any licences are subject to a comprehensive environmental impact assessment,” says a crown estate spokesperson.
Bevan created Save Hemsby’s Coastline after the storm surge of 2013, when the village lost 30 metres of land overnight and seven houses tipped into the sea. “That’s when something should’ve been done,” says Lorna’s brother, Lyndon Bevan. “The 2013 storm was ‘once-in-a-lifetime’. And then we had another. And then we had another.”
And nothing was done. Meanwhile, each year a fresh wave of incomers invest life savings in a dream home by the sea. One home on the most vulnerable Marrams is currently on the market for £200,000, with a small proviso to check coastal erosion. Houses appear to be a comfortable distance from the sea. Only long-term residents realise that the sea devours such distances in a decade or two. No regulations stop such sales. Most mortgage companies won’t lend but at least one resident with a house on the brink has a mortgage, and insurers still insure.
“When people come and look, estate agents put a spin on it and say: ‘You’re OK for 15 years,’” says Colin Martin, who has lived on the coast here for 70 years. “You can take the ‘1’ off that. A lot of people are sold the dream. You can sell anything when the sun is shining.”
“People think we’re all a bit dippy for living here,” says one woman who retired to the Marrams with her husband 22 years ago. “When we came we couldn’t see the sea from our house.” Now it’s nibbling the road at the bottom of their drive.
“We realised there was some erosion,” says Genny Measures, who moved with her husband, Simon, on to the Marrams two and a half years ago. “We’re not stupid. We were told that the sea defences were coming, and we’ve got plenty of land [between our house and the sea] and we’ll be OK for at least 20 years.”
“We thought you only live once, let’s try and live the dream,” says Simon. “But if the house goes, that’s our lives. The stress is not knowing what on earth is going on at any point.” Simon fears for the future of Hemsby. “What if the big holiday businesses pull out? People won’t book a seaside holiday with no seaside. It will become a ghost town.”
Hemsby residents have plenty of targets for their anger. Coastal protection is variously the responsibility of the Environment Agency (EA), Great Yarmouth borough council and the Marine Management Organisation. Big coastal defence decisions are made on EA cost-benefit calculations that Lorna Bevan argues are unfair, focusing on the modest “rateable value” of Hemsby’s homes rather than its tourist businesses, which generate £88m every year. Then there’s the local MP, Conservative Brandon Lewis. “Our MP has won the hide-and-seek championship for four years consecutively,” says Lines.
After the latest storms, Lewis called for a debate on coastal protection in the House of Commons. The government recently spent £40m on (mostly riverine) flood defences in his constituency, which protect 15,000 homes and numerous businesses in Great Yarmouth, explains Lewis. Meanwhile, Hemsby has belatedly been granted planning permission to place large granite rocks at the base of its dunes to buy sea-edge homes more time. But this will cost an estimated £20m and is unlikely to happen unless government funds miraculously appear. As an emergency response, the borough council has bought some rocks, which are being placed along just 40 metres of Hemsby’s 1,300-metre coast.
There’s nothing managed about “managed retreat” in Hemsby, is there? “That’s a fair point,” says Lewis. “The managed retreat seems to be: ‘When they go, they go.’ It is utterly tragic that people have lost their properties, but it is a very complex picture.” He says the local authority is responsible for drawing up the shoreline plan, but, unusually, a chunk of the beach and dunes is privately owned, by the Geoffrey Watling Charity, a trust based on the landholdings of a deceased local businessman. “To expect the taxpayer to pay for the protection of Watling land is challenging,” says Lewis.
What about more central government funds for coastal protection? “The Environment Agency is one of the largest quangos in Europe, so it’s pretty big and well-funded,” says Lewis. “To completely stop coastal erosion at Hemsby, the simple solution is a sea wall, but then you have no beach, which destroys the economy of Hemsby. There is clearly a wider issue on the east coast.”
Faced with various authorities failing to protect Hemsby, the village has tried to defend itself. To put anything on the beach requires planning permission. Local people were allowed to put 75 concrete blocks on the beach as a trial, but other attempts by individuals to erect DIY defences have been blocked. As the coastal crisis deepens, more direct action to defend homes seems likely. “We’ve decided it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” smiles lifeboat crew member Chris Batten.
One resident, Lance Martin, an indefatigable former soldier whose house is called Dune Fall, obtained permission to place rocks around the base of the dunes below his home. These saved his house during the latest storm – just. Left on the brink, he raced to enlist local digger drivers and neighbours to drag his wooden chalet inland before the council condemned it for demolition.
There was great spirit to this work. “It’s like a slightly crap Norfolk DIY SOS,” laughed one onlooker after the first attempt to drag the chalet away from the edge failed. But after a week of ingenious pulling and juggling with ropes, cables and telegraph poles, Martin’s home was shifted away from the edge. “My understanding is the Dutch government puts something like €1bn a year into their sea defences,” says Martin. “Why can’t we do that for the UK’s whole coast?”
In 2020, the UK government announced it would double its investment in flood and coastal erosion protection to £5.2bn over six years, but coastal campaigners point out that most of the money goes on riverine flood defence inland. The Dutch spent far more on sea defences and their coastline is a fraction of Britain’s – Essex alone has a longer coastline than the Netherlands.
Hemsby’s people cannot understand why they’re only getting 40 metres of rock defences. “I get frustrated as much as everyone else does. It’s exhausting, the bureaucracy,” says James Bensly, a borough and county councillor who also owns Hemsby’s beach cafe and several beach kiosks. “I work here, it’s my livelihood, but I can see what the local authorities are stuck with. They don’t have the power to address this. They have very little power, in all honesty. This is a global issue.
“We are the canary in the coalmine. What is happening here could happen to any major coastal community around the UK. We really need to get the enthusiasm down in London to make changes to the tools that are in place to help coastal communities.”
For now, all Hemsby possesses is the power of its small community. Amid tears and anger, their emergency meeting ends after thanks from one of its newly homeless residents. “We may have lost everything, but when we were removing our belongings with just a couple of hours’ notice, there were so many people who came and helped us,” she says, as villagers wipe tears from their eyes. “Stood here, I feel broke, but a millionaire.”
