Despair of the residents whose Norfolk village has been left to fall into the sea
CRISTIE MORRIS has nightmares that the sea outside her house is lapping at her windows and she and her ten-year- old daughter are trapped inside. ‘Every two hours I wake and think, “Is everything OK?”’ says Cristie — to which the answer, sadly, is no.
Thanks to coastal erosion, the three-bed room home she has owned for 24 years in the village of Hemsby on the Norfolk coast is about to fall into the sea. The road in front of it has already washed away and the 65ft that separates it from the cliff edge is shrinking every day.
Best-case scenario, she predicts, it will remain until winter. ‘But we could have an unusually high spring tide that could take us all,’ says Cristie, 49, who works in a nursing home.
‘It’s terrifying, heartbreaking. Having your house fall into the sea is a grieving process. This is my home and I don’t want to move.’
Not only that, she says, but all her money is in her house, like most residents of this tightknit community, because their properties’ structure and proximity to the coast mean they weren’t eligible for a mortgage and had to pay for them outright in cash. ‘I can’t sell it. It’s worth nothing.’ Her grief is compounded by anger — having fought for more than a decade to get permission to build a near milelong - sea berm, or granite rock defence, to stop p the erosion, residents were told last October r that there was insufficient Government funding - for the estimated £20 million cost.
‘I’m so angry and upset,’ says Cristie, one of f 17,000 to sign a petition started by the Save e Hemsby Coastline (SHC) group to finance the e project, handed to No 10 last month.
The Government says the village, whose population of 3,000 swells to 25,000 in the summer, doesn’t meet the criteria for funding because it doesn’t have enough houses. But SHC points out this is a seaside resort that contributes £80 million from tourism to Norfolk’s economy every year. ‘I’m flabbergasted, disgusted, appalled, ashamed — you name it — by the Government,’ says SHC founder and local businesswoman Lorna Bevan, 58.
‘We have got coastal defences all around Norfolk, except for our little stretch, which provides so much — and we’re the bit that’s unprotected.’
Harsh words — but ones that will be heard increasingly in coastal communities around the UK as global warming, which causes higher sea levels and increasingly volatile weather, accelerates the rate at which our coast is eroding.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre For Climate Change Research estimate that by 2050 a third of England’s coastline — up to nearly 1,200 miles — will be under pressure from rising sea levels, an area estimated to comprise 544,000 residential properties.
ACCORDING to the Environment Agency, 53 per cent of English and Welsh cliffs are subject to instability and erosion, with the soft clay cliffs on the east and south coasts of England particularly affected.
Sea berms and other defences that trap sand to slow the sea can stop or slow erosion — but at a colossal cost. So should the Government, which has already announced £5.2 billion will be spent before 2027 on defences against coastal erosion and flooding (a sum critics claim isn’t enough), prepare for mass claims for coastal defences? Or must we accept that some communities will be lost?
When Cristie paid £23,000 for her home on The Marrams in 2000, there was a row of houses in front of hers and a ‘massive’ sand dune blocking her view of the sea.
She estimates she had to walk around 130ft to reach the sea, where it had always been her dream to live: ‘It puts your mind at ease.’
She started to realise the severity of coastal erosion in 2013 when, during a particularly bad storm, a lifeboat shed on Hemsby beach was swept into the sea. ‘That was when we started to worry,’ says Cristie, a single mum whose daughter, Oceania, was born three days later.
Yet the pace of erosion remained relatively slow. Residents say they were told by authorities it would occur at one metre per year. ‘Every year the sand dunes in front of us got smaller, but the sea still seemed miles away,’ says Cristie.
Until 2018, that is, when the now infamous Beast From The East storm took away 75ft of Hemsby coastline in just eight days, pulling seven homes into the sea, with owners of five other properties on the precipice evacuated and handed a Section 78 order by the council, under which a building deemed dangerous can be demolished.
‘The storm took most of the homes in front of us,’ recalls Cristie. ‘ My daughter was terrified. She’d see houses toppling over and JCBs demolishing.’ Like most of her neighbours’ properties, Cristie’s house has no foundations into the ground.
Last March, Great Yarmouth council spent £735,000 on 2,000 tons of granite along a 260ft stretch of Hemsby coastline as a temporary measure. It has helped protect the land directly behind it, but some believed the sea would crash against the unprotected areas of coast on either side of it, including Cristie’s front garden, with even greater force as a result. ‘And that’s what it did,’ she says. ‘It devastated everything.’
Last November, during another storm, the 200-metre access road to Cristie’s property collapsed into the sea in a matter of minutes. ‘I just managed to get my camper van and car off my drive before the road fell in,’ says Cristie. ‘My neighbour and I saw a big chunk go. We were hugging each other and crying.’
Cristie now has no way of vacating her property of large possessions, which will either be swallowed by the sea or demolished. ‘I can’t carry a bed or sofa up the path,’ says Cristie, who has been forced to apply for council accommodation.
A prisoner in her own home after dark, when it is too dangerous to go outside because of the drop to the beach below, she is nonetheless adamant she won’t vacate her property ‘until the sea is lapping at the door’.
You suspect that won’t be long. ‘Out of my bedroom window I can’t see the beach any more, just sea. It is the biggest infinity pool ever. I joke we have a millionaire’s view.’
Perhaps if their properties were more expensive, more priority would be made by authorities to provide sea defences. ‘If these were all great big mansions we wouldn’t be having this conversation,’ says Simon Measures, 52, a web designer who bought his three-bedroom Hemsby home for £120,000 in cash in 2020 and feels ‘despair’ and ‘ extreme anger that this could so easily have been avoided’ had defences been put in five or ten years ago.
When he and wife Geneveive, 56, bought their home they assumed being more than 80 metres from the sea meant their house would last their lifetime. ‘ But over the past two years things have accelerated dramatically.’
In last November’s storm they lost more than 90ft in one day. The following month five more Hemsby homes were demolished.
FOR now, the couple’s home is relatively protected by the sea berm, which sits 50 metres in front of their property. But, says Simon, ‘the water is going either side of the rock. If it’s a particularly violent storm you feel the house judder. As soon as you hear the rattle you’re awake. Your nerves are jangling’.
He says Hemsby residents no longer count how long they have in days and weeks, but ‘in storms and high tides. There’s a damaging high tide coming. I can look at four properties which will be perilously close to getting a Section 78 notice’.
Geneveive, an accounts company administrator, adds: ‘It’s heartbreaking, watching your friends and neighbours being pulled away one by one. They’re not numbers on a paper, they’re real people.’
As Simon puts it: ‘We don’t have an option to move out. We’ve all put our money into these properties. There’s no support.’
Lorna says Hemsby’s erosion
problems are exacerbated by dredging — scouring the sea bed for shingles that can be sold on for building. ‘Fifty per cent of the UK’s dredging is taken off this stretch of shoreline,’ she says, adding that when dredging became more commonplace in Hemsby in the 1980s, ‘I believe that’s when we started to see our coastline disappear’.
Sue Slatford believes dredging changed the direction of the tide outside her Hemsby home and is probably one of the reasons it was demolished by Great Yarmouth Borough Council last March.
‘What dredging takes out, the sea tries to make right again,’ says Sue, a secondary school supply teacher who says that when she bought her three-bedroom wooden chalet in 2020 her estate agent barely mentioned coastal erosion, while the plumber who came to switch on her water supply told her she’d have ‘at least’ 15 years.
The magic of living on the coast put paid to any worries. ‘The rainbows were amazing — they’d come right to the edge where the water was breaking,’ she recalls. ‘It was very special.’
But one weekend last March, a storm arrived so fierce it sent spray over the top of her roof. Sue, a single mother to an adult son, insists she wasn’t frightened.
Nonetheless, residents in her collection of five properties north of the Hemsby beach ‘gap’, the first in the area to suffer significant erosion, woke to find their homes, previously around 12 metres from the edge, were now around six metres away.
The following Friday the council handed Sue a Section 78, sending a demolition crew the next day. ‘It was a shock,’ she recalls, of the diggers that arrived to pull down her home and those of her ‘distraught’ neighbours.
Now in a rented property, she still has the keys to the property that was reduced to rubble — a bitter reminder of ruined dreams.
It’s not just homes being pulled over the edge, but businesses, as James Bensly, owner of Hemsby Beach Cafe, currently 67 steps from the water’s edge and ‘one bad storm’ from being destroyed, knows all too well.
The cafe, which has been in James’ family since his grandad bought it in 1963, when it was ‘at least a third of a mile from the sea, if not further,’ shares a building with Hemsby Lifeboat Station, which announced plans to relocate in January because of its precarious position.
James, 45, lives with 41-year-old wife Louise, with whom he has run the cafe for the past 16 years, a quarter of a mile inland, so their house is not in imminent danger. But, he says: ‘If I haven’t got a business I haven’t got a home. It is a massive worry.’
A local councillor, he says coastal erosion is affecting those in Hemsby who have ‘no safety net’ and are being ignored: ‘ Once you’ve lost your home, there’s no compensation package.’
While these homes can get insurance against damage to their property or theft, for example, insurance companies won’t insure the properties against the specific effects of coastal erosion.
And although the relevant local authority sometimes offers compensation for the cost of putting your belongings in storage in the event of receiving a Section 78, this is means-tested and there is no relocation package.
James acknowledges that the matter of who should foot the bill for coastal erosion is ‘complex’ but is angered Hemsby residents ‘jumped through every hurdle’ to get permission to build their defence, only to be told the funding they assumed would be theirs would not materialise.
‘It is a shock and depressing and we feel let down to find out we don’t fit into this Environment Agency point- scoring formula. We don’t have enough houses, but we’re losing houses, and while we’re losing them, more and more homes are going to be affected. We’re struggling to see the mechanics of that, especially when you see other places around the Norfolk coastline, including Sheringham, Cromer and Sea Palling, that have sea defences.’
Without urgent funding, the community he loves will be washed away. And, he says: ‘I’d be heartbroken.’