The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  Their tenancy of the estate is set to continue; John Buxton’s son recently renewed the lease until 2099, though Mr Buxton said it would only survive that long if the defences are maintained and renewed. That is not guaranteed. In 2008, English Nature, the agency responsible for managing wildlife and wild places, inadvertently released a discussion paper that considered letting the sea break through a fifteen-mile stretch of coast between Eccles-on-Sea and Winterton: five fresh-water lakes and six villages, including Eccles, Sea Palling, Horsey and Hickling, which lies beyond Horsey Mere, would be lost, and a vast bay or inlet would be created, covering one per cent of Norfolk and restoring much of the North Broads to salt marsh, which they had been 2,500 years ago, when the sea lay a mile further east.

  Mr Buxton had played no part in the campaign to resist the idea. He didn’t need to; the local opposition was very fierce. It was led by a man who lived in Hickling, which had flooded on St Lucia’s Day, 1287, when the water rose a foot (thirty centimetres) above the altar in Hickling parish church, and 180 people had drowned. Eric Lindo and a friend had coordinated meetings, mobilized local politicians and petitioned central government; he said no one in Whitehall had come across a double act like theirs. The plan was dropped. Some people said it would have been, anyway – it was a thought experiment, which wasn’t meant to be published, let alone put into practice. There was delight that the bureaucrats had been forced to retreat – and yet no one doubted that the rising seas would be harder to defeat.

  ~

  At the end of the summer of 2013, as the hot sunny days began to turn cloudy and rain-spotted, I spent a week in Southwold, the Suffolk town that became an island in 1953, when the sea swept through the marshes behind it and cut it off from the mainland. One morning, I walked past the pier and the rows of coloured beach huts beyond the car park to reach the beach at Easton Bavents, where I could see the ramp at the beginning of the defences built by Peter Boggis, the King Canute of East Anglia, who had grown so impatient with English Nature and its failure to protect his family’s rapidly eroding land that he had decided to do it himself.

  Boggis had lived in Easton Bavents, the clifftop hamlet on the edge of Southwold, since he was four years old, and even when his family had rented out their house for the summer, they had only relocated to a caravan on the beach, which then lay a mile to the east. He’d only had one prolonged spell away from Easton Bavents, when he was doing national service in the Royal Navy, and it had coincided with the Great Tide of 31 January 1953. He was in Malta when he got a ‘worrying telegram’ saying that 300 people in Southwold had drowned. In fact, the real total was four. He moved back to Southwold in 1954 and worked for an engineering company. When his father died in 1971, he moved into his house on the edge of the cliff. Five years later, he moved out. ‘My marriage had broken down, for which I consider myself totally responsible,’ he said. Boggis walked out of his father’s house in a boiler suit, emblem of his professional calling, but, even then, he didn’t leave Easton Bavents. His grandfather had died within three months of his father, and he moved into his house, The Warren, where we met. It was set further back from the cliff, which means it will be safer for longer than the other houses in Easton Bavents.

  By 2002, when he started work on his defences, the cliff had moved 160 metres inland, and the 340 acres that his grandfather had bought in 1924 had been reduced to 160. Such loss of land is not unusual. Dunwich, which lies five miles down the coast, has been reduced from a great port to a tiny hamlet, with a few houses, a church and a museum – a vestigial village dedicated to memorializing its own past. Twelve churches have shuffled off the retreating cliff edge, and now lie beneath the waters of the bay. Many other buildings will go the same way. In 2014, the Environment Agency estimated that more than 7,000 homes will fall into the sea this century, and a recent report by the Committee on Climate Change put the potential loss even higher: by the 2080s, it said 100,000 properties, 1,600 kilometres of road, 650 kilometres of railway and 92 stations will be at risk. So will ports, power stations and gas terminals. Toxic waste from 1,000 landfill dumps may fall into the sea.

  Yet Boggis did not accept the erosion as inevitable. He was seventy-one years old when he started work, and he wasn’t exactly running around like a three-year-old, but, being an engineer, he knew what he was doing. He said that his attempt to hold back the waves required nothing more than ‘common sense’, but it was plain that he regarded the term as the highest possible praise.

  He used lorry-loads of rubble to build an improvised road from Southwold Pier to the clifftop village of Easton Bavents, and, once it was in place, he sent more lorries along it, loaded with material that he packed against the cliff to form a sacrificial wall that would erode instead of the land. Some people got tired of the thirty-eight-tonne lorries rumbling past their homes, and the rubble that washed down the coast. Others saw him as a hero of an inimitably English kind: self-reliant, inventive, dismissive of bureaucratic procedure, and, above all, eager for his day in court.

  His real enemy was not nature, but English Nature, or ‘English Nazis’, as he liked to call the agency. There was an Encyclopaedia of Planning Law and Practice on his desk, and he was constantly referring scornfully to ‘the powers-that-be, in all their wisdom’. He did not wait for their approval; by the time English Nature ‘became aware that something they said could not be done was being done, and at no cost to the nation,’ he had built a wall a kilometre long that had slowed the rate of erosion. Before, the land had been disappearing at the rate of ten metres a year, and, since the wall had been there, they had lost two metres in ten years. Yet the cost of fighting English Nature defeated him: in 2005, he was declared bankrupt and forced to abandon his defences. Since then, ninety per cent of his structure had been lost and the land was beginning to slip away again.

  The process is not entirely one-way. Sometimes, land is gained as well as lost. The South England flood of 1287, which destroyed houses in Dunwich and swept away the town of Winchelsea, in East Sussex, left New Romney landlocked a mile from the coast. As the River Rother silted up, Rye became a port instead. Yet its status was provisional, as well. When Celia Fiennes went to Rye, some 400 years later, she noted that it had begun to lose its access to the sea: ‘it does still come up to Rhye town as yet but its shallow,’ she wrote. Romney Marsh, which was known as the ‘Fifth Continent’ or the ‘Gift of the Sea’, was expanding southwards and eastwards, as it was reclaimed by innings and one-way drains, so that villages like Lydd, which had been established on an island in a sandy lagoon, found themselves several miles inland.

  Sea-level rise is far less even-handed. The Deep, the museum I visited in Hull, has an interactive exhibit that allows you to spin a wheel and watch the water creep across the fields of North Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire. In most projections, the Somerset Levels and the Fens are the first to go, followed by other places that I know and love, like coastal Essex and the Wirral. Cornwall becomes an archipelago, and Scotland is cut off from the rest of Britain. In the Midlands, the enlarged Severn stretches so far inland that it almost meets the Wash, in a version of ‘the Lake’ that covers central England in Richard Jefferies’ After London. Yet it is the east coast that will be affected most; in some projections, cities like Hull and Chelmsford disappear, and Norwich lies so far offshore it would take all day to reach its sunken ruins.

  ~

  Boggis knew he wouldn’t win. His first wife, who lived in one of the houses that stands metres from the cliff edge, remembered going to a party in a bungalow that lay several hundred metres further east. Boggis knows that more of us will end up with memories of dancing in gardens beneath the waves, but he remained determined not to give in.

  Boggis must have been a powerful man in his prime, but he was eighty-two years old, and he had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He drove me the short distance to the northern end of the disintegrating remnants of his sea wall, and when he got out of the car, I had to take his
hand and help him down the slope on the edge of the corn field. He had only been allowed to keep the car because it was bought for him after he was declared bankrupt, but when his bankruptcy expired, he intended to revive the other machines through which he projected his failing strength, like the disassembled digger that hung from a frame in his back garden, and resume his fight against nature and bureaucracy.

  In the meantime, he had one more defiant gesture prepared. Before I left him, he drove me to the southern end of his defences and parked beside a pile of boulders that he had drawn up on the cliff at the top of the improvised road that ran downhill, past sheep-dotted fields, to the car park beside Southwold Pier. It was a characteristically theatrical gesture: when all was lost, and there was no other hope of saving the houses on the cliff, including the one where his ex-wife lived, he would tip the stones on to the beach below, as a final barrier against the waves.

  I left him sitting in his car and walked down to the beach. I couldn’t see the giant rockery from below, but I could see the twisted pipes, bricks and rubber tyres that protruded through the last remnants of his defences, like the handholds on an urban climbing wall.

  Further along the beach, I came to Easton Bavents Broad, which the sea had breached in the previous winter. The trail of driftwood strewn across the fifty metres of pebbled sand showed how the sea had reached the wide reed-fringed pool and turned its water brackish. There were purple flowers in the field behind it and lorries on the road. I passed the Eastern Broad River Outfall, a fenced-in pond of dark, still water, and followed a footpath along the edge of a field until I reached Easton Bavents. The seaward half of the last cottage on the lane that led to the end of Boggis’s defences was dark and empty, but the landward half was rented out; there was a salt cellar on the table and a dishcloth hanging from the door of the oven in the kitchen. Danger – Keep Out – Cliff Eroding, said the sign at the end of the lane, where the road ended abruptly.

  Juliet Blaxland lived in the most landward of the three cottages. It was spare and weathered: there were faded fittings in the kitchen, and books about the sea on a shelf in the draughty downstairs bathroom. The upstairs window looked across Boggis’s diminishing clifftop fields to the part of Southwold where the sea had broken through in 1953. The town would be even more vulnerable when the protective shoulder of Easton Bavents was removed.

  Juliet, who was an architect, admired Boggis’s efforts, though she was conscious of the absurdity of shoring up the cliffs with clay dug up inland, sacrificing one part of Suffolk to the sea in order to save another. She had recently visited a church on one of the islands in the Venetian Lagoon, and she had realized that Suffolk will look the same in fifty years: a Northern European version, with farms scattered across outcrops of high land, linked by boats instead of roads, like the island villages created in the Somerset Levels two winters in a row.

  Yet the ingenuity and stubbornness that Peter Boggis had displayed might slow the process. As I travelled along the east coast in the summer of 2013, visiting places that had flooded in the past and meeting people threatened by the rising waves, I was conscious of the wind turbines that had appeared on the horizon, modern versions of the Horsey wind-pump, displaced offshore and anchored in the shifting soil of Doggerland in an attempt to slow the rise of the water that had covered it.

  I wanted to see them close up, so, one day, I caught a boat to the London Array, the world’s largest wind farm, which was emerging in the mouth of the Thames Estuary, between the Kent and Essex coasts.

  ~

  We left Ramsgate in bright sunshine, but, beyond the harbour wall, the mist closed in. A white bar of chalk hanging above the docks was the last glimpse of the mainland to disappear. The diverging trails of our wake were the only markers of progress as we drove across the sunken plain of Doggerland, towards Long Sand and Deep Knock, the sandbanks on the edge of Black Deep, where the London Array was being built.

  I had crossed the North Sea before, by ferry, before the Channel Tunnel was built, but not since I knew what it concealed. The water was so flat and calm that I had no sense of how fast we were going; we might have been moored in a still, grey pool, no longer than the boat. I imagined walking to the side and slipping overboard. Opening my eyes beneath the surface, I wouldn’t find myself suspended in the blue vault of a summer sea, lit by angled shafts of sunlight, but in a cold grey fog that matched the one above the surface, hung with twisting wreaths of silt. While the boat circled to pick me up, I would sink again, feeling the vertiginous pull of the deep water covering the drowned world below.

  ~

  The scale of the land that was lost has only been acknowledged in the last twenty years. At first, archaeologists believed Doggerland was a land bridge, a promontory or isthmus connecting Britain to the rest of continental Europe. In the 1990s, an archaeologist called Bryony Coles proposed its true extent. She called it Doggerland, after the North Sea shoal invoked in the nightly prose poem of the shipping forecast:

  Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer.

  Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

  writes Carol Ann Duffy in her poem, ‘Prayer’. Coles argued that Doggerland was not a remote, uninhabited place, but the heart of the continent.

  Yet there was still more work to do. Over the years, the oil companies that had hunted for deposits beneath the North Sea and built installations in its silty bed had collected seismic data mapping its terrain, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century that we had the computing power required to convert it into 3-D renderings of the lost land. As Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith fed the data through the computers at the University of Birmingham and revealed the course of a river, as large as the Rhine, that once ran across Dogger Bank, they realized that they were discovering ‘an entire, preserved, European hunter-gatherer country’ – a lost land that, at its most extensive, was as large as the UK.

  Even before its submersion, it had been dominated by water: 1,600 kilometres of river channels and twenty-four lakes or marshes wound through the plain, which was dominated by the Outer Silver Pit, a lake almost the same size as the largest in Europe. The marshy plain would have seemed bleak and featureless to the modern eye, but to Mesolithic people it would have offered ‘a rich living’, Vincent Gaffney says. He compared it to the Somerset Levels in one of the intervals between the incursions of the sea, when the land was covered by ‘extensive areas of dense reed bed, wet carr, willow, birch and alder woodland’. The reeds, or withies, that fuelled the staple industry of the Levels for centuries would have grown in Doggerland as well, and deciduous woodland provided ‘edible fungi’ and fuel for cooking and warmth. The inhabitants would have picked fruits, nuts and herbs – raspberries, blackberries, hazelnuts, acorns, chestnuts, sorrel, water lily and meadowsweet – and hunted cormorants, mallards, grebes and cranes.

  As the climate warmed, there would have been more animals to hunt: reindeer and horse, at first, and, later, deer, pig, wolf, hare, beaver and dog. They caught fish and gathered shellfish on coasts and beaches.

  ~

  We reached the substation first. It appeared beside us suddenly, like an image projected on the white canvas of the fog. It was half of the wind farm’s double-chambered heart, which collects the power and sends it ashore via cables buried in the Mesolithic hunting grounds on the seabed, and it was brand new, its bright yellow triangular base and multilayered deck unweathered by wind or waves. The MPI Adventure, the ship that installs the turbines, lay hidden beyond it in the fog, sturdy and immobile as an island on the steel legs that raise its hull above the waves. We circled it, foghorn blowing, in tribute to its improbable presence.

  It faded into the mist, and, within minutes, a turbine took its place. I knew it was as tall as the London Eye, but, since I couldn’t see the top, I couldn’t get any sense of how large it might look on a clear day, when its position in the sea would be revealed. It might have been a post planted in an endless ocean, or an infinitely tall beanstalk rooted in
a pond measured by the length of the boat. I found it hard to believe that there were dozens more like it hidden in the mist, tended by boats that buzzed between them like bees in a field of giant metal sunflowers.

  By the time the remaining ninety turbines had been installed, the London Array would cover an area of a hundred square miles – though, by then, it would no longer qualify as the largest wind farm in the world, for there were already larger ones being planned and built. They were part of a new industry emerging off Britain’s coasts. Like many Victorian resorts, Ramsgate had been in decline since air travel brought foreign holidays within reach for the average British person, but now the harbour was overflowing with visitors, and the town’s hotels and restaurants were fully booked. The offshore site manager, who was on the boat, was a Londoner who had worked in oil and gas in Qatar before he got a job on the Thanet wind farm, further south. He lived in Brighton, but he had a flat in Ramsgate, like many of his colleagues. They had their own running group, a football team and a band.

  Other cities on the east coast were benefitting from the renewables industry. As we made our way back to the shore, we stopped at a turbine to pick up a man who had asked for a lift, as if flagging down a passing cab. He was called Steven Nicholson, and was a health and safety officer for Siemens, the German electronics and engineering conglomerate that manufactures vanes for the London Array. Nicholson was from North Ferriby, the village west of Hull where my grandmother lived for more than forty years. I was so disorientated that the coincidence didn’t seem surprising; I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that everyone on the boat was from Ferriby. They certainly could have been from Hull, for Siemens had opened a wind-turbine manufacturing plant in the city’s docks. It was the kind of investment Hull needed, Nicholson said. In 2002, he had set up his own engineering business in Hull, having worked in the oil and gas industry since 1984, in West Africa, China and the Gulf of Mexico, but it didn’t do well, and, in 2008, he had decided to go back offshore. He had been working on the London Array for a year.