Taking a Walk Patrick Barkham
The nice thing about falling in love with a landscape is that you can develop a crush on as many as you want and no one gets hurt. I’ve got a new love. I’ll call her the chalet coast.
The 1960s were an era of unprecedented jeopardy, when roughly eight miles of wild coastline were disappearing every year under nuclear power stations, gas terminals, container ports and caravan parks. So the National Trust dispatched geography students around England, Wales and Northern Ireland to decide which shores were worth saving from development. These keeneyed young surveyors were particularly worried by one thing: shack development.
‘Large area of shacks on the hillside’, they wrote neatly on OS maps. The youthful east-norfolk coast surveyor concluded: ‘A scene of shacks, chalets, caravans, holiday camps, bingo halls, candyfloss, bicycles-for-two, greyhound racing, stock-cars, etc, on a not very attractive stretch of coast, mostly of low cliffs. Unworthy of protection or redemption – it is completely past it.’
Today, many people might chuckle and wonder, what were those shacks? They were, of course, the holiday homes of another era, the dreams of people of modest means who built themselves beachside bungalows in the days before planning controls. These shacks were often converted into permanent homes, and had our urge to build been left unchecked, the whole British coast would now probably resemble the long suburban stretches of Sussex’s shoreline. Instead, the students’ survey galvanised Enterprise Neptune, launched in 1965, and the National Trust has since protected 775 miles of unspoilt coast.
The Trust didn’t save any of east Norfolk’s beachside, though, and its shacks are now a novelty. Although I’m a Norfolk man, I’ve only just discovered this long sandy curve of the county, with low dunes and even lower land behind sustained by sea defences built after the 1953 floods. These bought a fragile peace for most places, although not Happisburgh, the scene of spectacular erosion that has displaced residents and exposed ancient fossils, including the oldest human footprints outside Africa.
Most visitors go to Horsey Gap, where thousands of grey seals pup in winter, but I drive to North Gap, where the road turns to sand and there’s parking for three cars. Below the precarious dunes stand an array of shacks, chalets and caravans. White, yellow and blue, they have roofs of tin or asbestos and draughty old sunrooms. If you are lucky enough to sleep in one on a wild night, you’ll hear the sea roaring behind your head. Following the dunes south to Sea Palling, I take a path through a tunnel of blackthorn and climb to their heights. From this vantage point, I can count seventeen towers of flint churches, demonstrating the mediaeval wealth of this open land.
You can have your gentrified coast. I’ve fallen for this stranger edge. I go home and greedily google chalets for sale. Estate agents call them ‘bungalows of non-standard construction’. The drabbest east-norfolk shack costs £110,000. My dream dies. But Londoners may be tempted by the bungalow and entire chalet park in Mundesley, yours for the price of a two-bed flat in Islington.
Would-be investors, however, might be wise to leave the chalet coast alone because rising seas mean the post-1953 defences will not see out this century. These humble chalets are more beautiful for their impermanence. I hope my children will live to see this coast change into something else, rewilded by the only savagery left in our lives: the sea.
North Gap, east Norfolk, OS map OL40 The Broads; map reference TG413289.