By Antonia Hoyle

LANCE MARTIN surveys the chaos around him, exhibiting all the exhaustion and euphoria of a man who has just moved house. Except in his case, he quite literally has. The black wood panelling and floor-to-ceiling sea views he is admiring belong to the same ‘dream home’ Lance has lived in for nearly six years. He has ‘merely’ moved the entire bungalow 22ft backwards — to stop it falling into the sea.

Last Friday, he and a handful of other residents of The Marrams, a seaside strip of over two dozen houses in the picturesque village of Hemsby, on the Norfolk coast, were forced to evacuate after coastal erosion left their homes on the precipice of the sandy cliff.

Such was the extent of the crisis that over the weekend Great Yarmouth Borough Council was forced to demolish five houses.

Coastal erosion has long placed Hemsby in jeopardy. In 2013 a storm surge destroyed seven homes, while the Beast from the East, the notorious February 2018 storm, led to seven more bungalows being demolished.

Lance’s two-bedroom bungalow would have been among them that year, had he not managed to move it 32ft back from the cliff edge. And so, a week ago, instead of issuing him with paperwork, the council gave him a verbal ultimatum: haul the whole building backwards a ‘noticeably significant distance’, far enough not to be in ‘imminent danger’, within a week, or it would be demolished by a digger. (The land behind Lance is privately owned, but he has permission to move the house there.)

But how on earth does one move a 12-ton, 32-ft wide house away from a sea threatening to swallow it whole, in only a week? With the help of three diggers, three telegraph poles, six chains, a long-suffering partner, the goodwill of a tight-knit community and the extraordinary resolve of one man, I discover, as I visit Lance to follow his mammoth effort.

‘There have been low moments, but we never lost the faith we could do it,’ says Lance, 65. ‘The worst of times bring out the best of people, and everyone has rallied around to help.’

A pragmatic grandfather who credits his cando attitude to 22 years in the Forces, Lance bought his home in November 2017 for £95,000, dreaming of a coastal retirement. He had spent the previous 17 years living in a London flat, where he was working as a security manager and spent most of his free time indoors.

Lance, whose son, Alex, 39, from Cardiff, a radio communications worker, has given him two grandchildren, knew the area was liable to coastal erosion and acquiring any building insurance was out of the question. But at that point his house was 130ft from the 30ft-high cliff edge so he figured that, allowing for 3ft of erosion a year, the house would last his lifetime.

Having enjoyed bird- spotting in his retirement, he says: ‘I wanted to live on the coast. Being down on the beach every day, surrounded by wildlife, gave me a new lease of life. I wasn’t that concerned. But then we got the Beast from the East, and that wiped away 40 metres [130ft] in a fortnight.’

His response was to seek out practical solutions. ‘ It’s no use breaking your heart over things you’ve got no control over. I’m not very good at talking about my feelings. I let things wash over me,’ he says, with no apparent irony.

Since then, he has been accustomed to his garden shrinking. The bashing Lance was expecting from the sea this winter never materialised but ‘then all of a sudden, a week ago, we got this surge’.

While he knew it would be prudent to move out, it was his partner of 18 months, Tracey, who prompted the decision, as the sea levels rose.

‘She goes through the tide forecast,’ says Lance, while he . . . well, buries his head in the sand. ‘I say, “I don’t want to know.” What I don’t know won’t hurt me.’

HIGH tides and 60mph winds sent the sea crashing into the coastline’s sandy cliffs, catching everyone by surprise. Like many local properties, Lance’s house — built as a holiday home in the 1920s when ‘building regulations weren’t as tough’ — had no foundations.

He believes he has been better protected than his neighbours because in 2018 he hired a digger to move 50 boulders, each the size of a small car, into a semi-circle in front of his house, to slow the tide. ‘You can’t stop the sea — but you can slow it down.’

Only so much, however. On Thursday last week, a building inspector from the council visited to suggest he and Tracey vacate the premises.

The couple — who have hired a chalet in a local holiday park for a month and put their belongings in storage — returned on the Friday to discover their garden reduced from five to two metres, the missing earth having plummeted to the beach below.

‘It was unnerving,’ says Lance, with some understatement. Tracey, who works in health care, is far more bothered than him. ‘ She worries. I would have slept through ough the storm, but Tracey would have ave been pacing with a torch. She said id she didn’t want to end up in the sea. a. She stressed hell of a lot about ut it. I admit, for both our safety, ety, it was wise precaution n to move out, but she understands derstands why I don’t want nt to live anywhere else.’

When I arrive at the aptly named Dune Falls at 11am m on Tuesday, Lance e in a buoyant mood, od, all things considered. idkes He jokes about being in possession osest of the best infinity pool in Norfolk and points out a seal darting under a wave, one of 600 that inhabit the coastline. What he lacks in domestic security he says he has made up for in the magic of coastal living, watching the stars over the North Sea with a glass of wine in the garden.

‘At night you feel the waves crashing and the bass rumble through the sand. You think, “Oh my God I am going in.” But you get used to it. This was my dream home.’

It could yet turn into a nightmare, however. As we stand by the windows in Lance’s living room, less than two metres from the precipice, the cliff edge crumbles before our very eyes.

‘Look, that piece of wood wasn’t sticking out before,’ says Lance, pointing out a newly created gap in his garden. The hand-crafted wooden workbench that was in his garden moments earlier is now bobbing in the sea, and Lance’s shed, standing proudly upright on my arrival, is lurching perilously to one side.

‘You brace yourself for it, but it is shocking, to see it all go like that,’ he says quietly, both of us wondering whether we too risk being thrown over, before he adds: ‘We’d better move back, for our own safety.’

His plan to move the property is much the same as it was in March 2018, when, following the Beast from the East, he was standing in the kitchen and felt a rumbling beneath his feet. The floorboards had moved and, standing on the joists, he saw the sea between his legs.

‘There was a resounding crack and the kitchen floor had dropped away,’ he says. ‘It was more worrying than frightening. I knew the storm would stop at some stage and was determined to save my property.’

After cutting the 18ft by 12ft kitchen away with power tools ‘and physically dropping it into the sea,’ he attached two telegraph poles at the base of both the back and front of his bungalow — no longer an L-shape — with chains and tied them to a winch attached to a tractor, which pulled the whole house forward. Afterwards, Lance spent £100,000 rebuilding the walls and installing new windows and a new kitchen.

‘Everyone thought I was crazy but because it was all on sand, it slid forward. We’ll tape the windows this time so if they crack, they won’t fall out. It sounds mad but it is easily done.’ Yet last time he only needed to move his house ten metres. This time t ime — to transport it across the road — it needs n e eds to travel 65ft. He refuses to Success: Lance hugs a

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