‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…’
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Chapter 1
‘I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter, the final, the ‘real’ version.’
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Chapter 55
The cyclone that had wrecked northern France, Belgium and south-eastern England in 2025 and devastated London and Brussels, was still remembered in 2050 but distantly. It was just one of the bouts of extreme weather that had affected the globe as temperatures increased more and more rapidly in the twenty-first century. Little had been done about the causes, for that would have meant too severe a disruption of the economic interests of the richest nations. Their policies had been to invest in protective structures, both political and physical, and the problems faced by the poorer world had given welcome opportunities to extend their influence. The large increase in population in Africa and Asia had seemed a threat at first, with attempts at mass emigration from the poorer to the richer world, but this had been solved simply by creating a powerful military barrier around the national boundaries of those who could afford it. Personal and corporate taxation was an increasing burden, but there was little choice.
Twice the average annual rainfall had fallen over southern England and the adjacent parts of mainland Europe in just five days in 2025. By coincidence it was about the same amount as had fallen during the cyclone that had hit Mozambique in 2000, though less than those that had repeatedly been reducing the cities of the Atlantic seaboard of the USA to permanent states of emergency. The failure of the flood barrier on the Thames had been tragic. Very high tides, coupled with a river level 20 metres above normal, had submerged its control systems. Most of central London had been covered by ten metres of water for two weeks. Many people had been drowned. What remained of the Government had moved to Manchester. At first the intention was to return, but the costs of reinstating London were so great that it had essentially been abandoned as a major centre. In the aftermath, however, Gross National Product had risen greatly with the rebuilding work that was necessary over a huge area and Southeast Asian investment funds had reaped huge rewards for the companies concerned.
It had been a devastatingly wet year in Broadland, but the influence of the cyclone had been reduced north of Cambridgeshire. The rivers had risen very high, but fortunately the floodbanks in the lower reaches of the Yare had quickly breached and a huge washland, that had been the Halvergate triangle, was able to take much of the water. Damage in Norwich and Yarmouth, although not minor, was much less than it might have been. Sea levels had continued to rise in the decades before the cyclone, but fortunately little had been done. It had not been economically feasible to raise or rebuild the banks or to create a flood barrier in the depressed state of British agriculture. That itself had been the consequence of the pervading market economy and the lack of confidence engendered by successive abuses of technological farming. Had the river floodbanks been strengthened, central Norwich would have been destroyed by backed-up river water, and Yarmouth, by the sea. But this was not widely recognised.
The cyclone had changed much. The Manchester Government had decided that much more investment was necessary to guard against future environmental disasters. The advice of international engineering companies from the Netherlands had been taken and a dramatic reinforced concrete embankment now bordered the Norfolk coast and extended on either side of the tidal sections of the lower rivers and in the towns. It was a pity that Norwich no longer enjoyed the riverscape that had linked the cathedral and the medieval city into a pleasing panoply. However, ‘the wall’ was so prominent that it had been vigorously marketed as a tourist attraction anyway, with its visitor centre and the new shopping mall (‘Gateway to the Broads’) that combined information on the Broads Heritage Area with ample opportunities to buy souvenirs and luxury goods.
The need to generate enormous national income, to maintain both the environmental defences and the military, had meant that most people had greatly reduced incomes. There was, however, still a coterie of the very well-off benefiting from the changes, and able to afford the delights of exclusive boutiques and the opportunities for cultural pleasures that their mobility afforded. Air travel had become very expensive. Fuel prices had risen as oil reserves were clearly dwindling. There was also a need to minimise the possibilities of illegal movements from those parts of the world that had failed to stem their rising populations early enough to prevent a near doubling from the six billion at the turn of the twenty-first century. The previous popular holiday destinations had also become less attractive as climate had changed, or too dangerous as the impacts of population increase and economic exploitation had left millions of desperate people whose only recourse was crime.
This had meant that holiday areas had had to be improved in Britain. There were problems in doing this. Much of the countryside had had to be converted to very intensive agriculture and industry because of the need to finance the defensive works and guard against the breakdown of supplies of food and goods. These had been seriously interrupted by climatic change, and particularly the chaos that increasing population had brought to much of the world. The wider countryside of Britain was, frankly, increasingly unattractive, even ugly. The trends of the late twentieth century had continued and, particularly away from the hills of the north and west, there were few areas where the vista was not dominated by roads and buildings, interspersed with highly mechanised agricultural installations. River quality had also deteriorated with greater isolation of the nation from European influences, something reflected perhaps in the re-birthing (their term) of the former Environment Agency as the National Business Environment Agency. The new title more accurately reflected the Government’s intentions and removed some confusion on the part of the Agency’s staff who had perceived it as an environment protection agency and been somewhat frustrated in their work.
The solution had been virtual reality centres for the less well-off and the creation of rigorously preserved Heritage Areas for those who could afford them. These could no longer be so large as the former National Parks and the many small Sites of Scientific Interest and National Nature Reserves had had to go, but that was a trend already showing up even before 2000. But they were exquisite. Expensive to visit perhaps, but artfully managed to take the visitor into a vision of the past that was unsurpassed elsewhere. The British genius for organisation, for the theatrical, and for the apparently eccentric defence of the interests of the underdog, particularly if a rare species, had all come together.
Broadland had been a natural choice. It had all the right features. Late in the twentieth century it had been described by a local naturalist, Ted Ellis, as ‘a place for the cure of souls’ and this had become part of the logo of Broadland Heritage, which had replaced the former Broads Authority. The area had a long history, beginning with the ice age and the filling of the valleys with peat and clay from successive invasions of the sea. That it had survived these gave comfortable reassurance at a time when such threats had again been realised. The successive waves of Dark Age invaders from abroad were played down for they echoed the less comfortable present threat of environmental refugees. Broadland also celebrated the origins of industry in the digging of the peat pits, which had become the basins of the Broads, for fuel. It was an epitome of how the beauty of the English landscape had been shaped by the hand of man to reflect a basic goodness and love of the soil.
There was a welter of literary references quoted in the displays of the Norwich visitor centre and the information stations, which were centred in the remaining villages. Arthur Ransome, John Betjeman, George Crabbe, Wentworth Day and Ted Ellis were all used to their fullest effect to maintain the ambience. Sales of beautifully produced souvenir books, masterpieces of the new information technologies, which used a deep understanding of linguistics with the possibilities of computer manipulation of digital photographs to create exactly the right image, were booming. Indeed, the department concerned with this in Broadland Heritage was perhaps the most influential, both in determining how the area was managed as well as the publicity that brought in the funds to maintain the business. It was usually just called the ‘image’ department.
A healthy income was very important, for maintaining the past was not cheap. It had been realised that Broadland would always suffer a problem of water quality. The intensification of the agricultural catchment had increased rather than decreased. The solution had been to create a series of compartments in Broadland, some of which could be completely isolated and maintained much as they had been early in the twentieth century, whilst other areas, where water quality was poor, were devoted to recreation. The conservation areas were centred around the Trinity Broads on the Muck Fleet and the Thurne Broads. These had small adjoining catchments, which Broadland Heritage had been able to buy in their entirety, following the flooding of 2025 and the bankruptcy of the previous owners, so that catchment use could be highly controlled.
A discrete fence, buried in hedges, carefully planted to simulate ancient hedgerows, surrounded each catchment, and in the Thurne, the water tables had been raised. The electric pumps had been removed and the eighteenth-century wind pumps fully reinstated. They were manned by information operatives, who dressed in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century dress and gave daily demonstrations of pump operations whilst relating the history of the area. In the Muck Fleet, a new Broad was being excavated by hand on Burgh Common, with operatives creating a feeling of the tenth century. Enormous attention had been given to authentication, with the land grazed by close replicas of ancient domesticated breeds of stock re-created by genetic manipulation from the starting point of some of the remaining rare breeds.
In these two conservation catchments, effort had also been concentrated on re-establishing the diverse plant communities of the fenlands, again using hand labour and traditional grazing for the most part. Broadland Heritage was a major employer and its image department had become skilled in the selection of employees who combined the right sort of appearance with an outgoing personality receptive to paying visitors. A week’s stay, with access to the conservation areas, was not cheap. Only a limited number of country house hotels, mostly developed from existing old houses close to the catchments, had been permitted. In the long tradition of British hotels, a stay was inordinately expensive, which confined the opportunity to the well-off. Land transport within the conservation areas was by foot, horse or cart (Plate 28) and trails had been built that were very natural in surface appearance, but which were underlain by new composites that resisted erosion and rutting in wet weather. There were boat trails too and visitors could either be rowed by information operatives who acted as guides or could hire a small sailing boat, though the sails were kept stowed, and the boat was discretely powered by batteries recharged nightly.
Foot and boat trails led to artfully hidden locations where the visitor could be close to populations of rare fenland plants and flocks of birds or the reintroduced otters and European beavers. The fen orchid had been saved by artificial propagation and although climatic conditions did not really favour it, its numbers could be boosted from glasshouse stock in years when the outdoor population disappeared. For the most part, however, hand cultivation had been able to maintain a range of communities specified as typical of the area from the work of fenland ecologists since the 1970s. The vegetation at the edges of the Broads was carefully monitored and cut back to give a natural-looking edge, but to prevent any serious encroachment on the open water. Research had produced management formulae so that it was now possible to guarantee sightings of bitterns feeding in the reed beds at dawn and marsh harriers nesting in the fens. Discrete wing-clipping and artificial feeding had helped maintain spectacular flocks of duck and geese year-round.
Hickling village had been transformed, with houses that concealed modern accommodation at the rear with historic accommodation at the front. It allowed visitors to move, over the course of a day, from life as it was in the Bronze Age, through Viking, Saxon, medieval, Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian settings, complete with more information operatives who, by being also the tenants of the houses, gave a particular historic connectivity…in the words of the image department.
Care had also been given to the rest of Broadland to create the best possible appearance and facilities. The recreation area was much bigger than the two conservation areas, and generated much of the income that was needed to support the latter and maintain a very high quality experience in it. It had not proved possible to reduce the nutrient flows in the Bure, Yare and Waveney and although Broadland Heritage had made a little headway with the Ant, its inability yet to purchase the catchment meant that for the time being this river was still largely used for recreation. With the exclusion of Hickling Broad and the Trinity Broads from all but conservation activities, it was in any case necessary to keep the water open in Barton Broad for competitive sailing and the popular re-enactment of the eighteenth-century ‘water frolics’.
A philosophy of quiet recreation had prevailed, however, so that speed boating was prohibited except in a new reservoir area covering part of the Halvergate triangle. The new flood wall had been used partly to enclose a deep flooded area, close to Yarmouth, where a vigorous boating industry had developed, serving both the coastal and freshwater zones. The near collapse of the holiday boating industry early in the twenty-first century had led in any case to a rethinking of the future, but it was the restriction on foreign travel that had saved it. The rather ugly fibreglass boats had been replaced by traditional wooden ones, or rather by ones made of new unrottable plastic composites that resembled wood so closely that it was necessary to look at a microscopic section of the material to confirm that they were not. The boats were also powered by electrical batteries, and moved more slowly than the previous diesel boats. Although ultimately the energy had to be generated by some means that was potentially environmentally damaging, the net damage was believed to have been reduced.
All boats were hired by the day. Visitors stayed in high quality land accommodation built in the waterside villages, again to traditional specifications. Much of it was thatched and took the produce of the conservation areas. There were few local residents, for properties had been bought up for conversion into holiday accommodation. Commercial traffic, necessary for essential supplies and restocking of the heritage shopping areas developed in the villages, was led in and out by short routes and not permitted to cross the region. Traffic on the roads was thus kept light and the usual pattern was for visitors to hire a boat for the day on one of the rivers, having driven to one of the regional recreational centres to pick it up. This had had the effect of confining the visitors by night to a few such centres, where the accommodation was also located and adding to the image of remoteness of the waterway, though in reality it remained very busy.
Special attention had been given to maintenance and restoration, even relocation, of traditional properties, even churches. This had required a special Act of Parliament and was well overdue. The age embraced organised religion to no great extent and the churches’ role was mostly as important landscape features. The parsons of the churches around the Muck Fleet and Hickling were mostly still genuine despite their period costume, but their income came mostly from Broadland Heritage. One proposal of the image department had been that even the staff at its headquarters, centred in Norwich, should be uniformed in period dress, but the Chief Executive and Controller had vetoed this. The company was now listed as one of the 100 most successful British companies and his photograph regularly appeared on the financial pages of the remaining national broadsheet newspaper. It was certainly not in his image to discard his business suit.
By and large the river banks had been improved. The change from holidays afloat to shore-based visits using day boats had increased the ease by which sections could be closed, and a programme of regrading and planting had been carried out. Ugly eroded edges had been eliminated. The development of a genetically modified clone of reed, which would establish quickly almost anywhere (genes of couch grass had been inserted) had helped. The danger now was that it would spread to the conservation areas, but fortunately it had been engineered to be sterile and for its rhizomes to be very resistant to fragmentation, so the problem was as yet seen only as a potential one.
Alongside the Bure and Yare it had been possible to isolate and restore a few Broads as examples of the former waterscape. Boat entry from the river was not allowed for it was necessary to keep these Broads entirely isolated and to pump in ground water to maintain their flushing rates, but the installations were highly concealed and soundproofed and the fantasy was not adulterated by them. Visitors were able to leave their electric boat in a camouflaged parking area, transfer to a rowing boat, pulled by an information operative if they wished, and dangle their hands among the lilies in the manner of an Emerson photograph, an image widely used by the company. At Hoveton Great Broad, a row across the water brought them to a wonderful small teashop, where the tables were graced by vases of flowering-rush and the cream teas came from the produce of authentic cattle breeds kept, and hand milked, in the conservation areas.
The grazing marshes had been a huge sheet of water following the cyclone and many people had doubted that they could ever have been recovered. For some ten years they had not, but the increased winter flooding of the early twenty-first century had stimulated the invention of new, very powerful pumps and processes of concrete construction that meant that very large structures could be quickly and relatively cheaply made. A barrier had been installed at Yarmouth to guard against storm surge tides, which were now to be expected more frequently, and to support this, nearly 2,000 hectares of grazing marsh had been enclosed as a reservoir, whose level could be regulated, alongside Breydon Water. In summer it was used as a huge area for sailing, water-skiing and power boating – it was, after all, 20 times bigger than any area that had previously been available for sailing and the size muffled noise problems in the flat lowland landscape. In winter the level was lowered so that there was a large emergency storage for flood waters. That having been constructed, the company had turned its attention to restoration of the grazing marsh.
The floods of 2025 had posed major problems for the marsh. Some people had felt that it was not worth trying to recover land from under several metres of water. The cost was very high and the farming that was likely to be possible was unprofitable without grants from the State. On the other hand, it was argued, if not openly, there was a principle at stake. In a country where the landscape entirely bore the shaping hand of man and had done so for generations, it was unthinkable that nature, even manipulated inadvertently by man, should be allowed to take its course.
The Broadland grazing marshes had been a historic landscape; historic landscapes were more interesting and attractive than the urban and intensive agricultural landscapes that had been imposed by the market economy since the early 1980s. The governments of that period were now reviled by the bulk of the community, but nothing had been done to reverse their effects, for policy was not determined by the people, but by the powerful multinational consortia who owned most of the country. Historic landscapes, furthermore, could be profitable if managed in the right way. The new heritage companies, created soon after the storm, when the military government that had taken over in the chaos that had destroyed central London handed back responsibility, at least apparently, to an elected government, were keen to invest.
It had been difficult to build the new river walls with so much water about, but no worse than creating a polder from the sea in Holland. The reservoir was quickly created and the rest of the land returned to a drainage regime equivalent to that before the Second World War. There was a mixture of wind pumps, restored to working order, and a couple of steam pumps. Broadland Heritage felt that diesel pumps did not have quite the appeal of wind and steam and did not reinstate these. It skilfully re-created those wind pumps that it did not fully restore to the romantic ruins that, set against a sunset, had been the very marrow of Broadland photography for decades. Its attention to detail was faultless. Gates with their sloping wooden rails across the dykes were made of the same virtually indestructible wood substitutes that were being used for boats, and cattle were kept as they had been for generations.
It was more difficult to ‘sell’ this landscape than those of the conservation and recreation areas, but it had helped to call it simply the ‘Windmill Heritage’. A few small touches – the heritage farm at Ash Tree where salt was prepared by the evaporation of sea water on peat fires by information operatives, the opportunity for children to mingle with cattle, even bulls, specially engineered to be very docile, and the working pumps – helped a great deal. Cart tours in the area were now a substantial earner for the company.
Indeed, all was proceeding very well. Broadland Heritage’s share value on the stock market had risen steadily and this was attributed to the care it had taken to provide what the market really wanted. Escape from the tribulations of a society showing many signs of distress was perhaps the most valuable commodity that could now be marketed. The world overseas was increasingly threatening and most people did not begrudge the additional levy placed on visitor fees and accommodation in heritage sites so that the defences could be maintained.
There were some disturbing signs. The spate of arson in the Hickling historic village was perhaps one, and the repeated mysterious problems with the computer telemetry system, which told the company’s headquarters staff exactly where every information operative was at any time, was another. This was particularly irksome, for the system also gave information on the position of every boat, cart and horse at every moment, displayed it on screens in the control room deep in the heart of medieval Norwich and analysed it. The company was thus able to keep track of which features of Broadland were proving most attractive and under what conditions of weather and current fashions. The image department was then able to adjust the marketing and publicity output to emphasise less popular features, redistribute the visitor load and maintain the impression of remoteness although at any one time in the main season there would be a quarter of a million people within the controlled area.
On a wider scale there was considerable unrest, and not only in the crowded estates of the poorer areas of the cities. But then, that was a normal feature of history and the image department had produced a splendid book showing the parallels between the current problems and those of the thirteenth and seventeenth century and how these had eventually been solved in ways that had given bucolic countryside and rejoicing people. There was even a virtual reality exhibition in the magnificent nave of the Cathedral at Norwich where people could experience something of the terrors of these periods and then be soothed into the pleasures that were to come in the late twenty-first century. They left with the recorded reassuring voice of a British Prime Minister of the mid-twentieth century, that they had ‘never had it so good’.
The cyclone that had wrecked northern France, Belgium and south-eastern England in 2025 and devastated London and Brussels was still remembered in 2050. Its lesson had been immediate, in a way that reports of disasters abroad had never been, to a populace treated nightly to the sanitised images on their television screens. It was quickly recognised as yet another example of the extreme weather that had affected the globe as temperatures increased more and more rapidly in the twenty-first century. Little had been done to remove the causes for that would have meant disruption of the economic interests of the richest nations. But physical devastation in the seats of economic power was a new reality that had to be faced. It brought home the difficulties that increasing populations of the Third World had been facing for decades. It, and similar cyclones affecting Washington and New York, triggered a response among people who had been uneasy about how society was managed, but had not been able to articulate it collectively in the face of a barrage of propaganda, subtly imposed by the advertising and the public relations departments of government and multinational corporations.
The failure of the flood barrier on the Thames, when very high tides coupled with twice the annual rainfall that had fallen on the catchment in just five days in 2025 had submerged its control systems, had been tragic for most of central London. It had been covered by ten metres of water for two weeks. Many people had drowned. What remained of the Government had had to move to Manchester, at first with the intention of returning. The costs of reinstating London were so great, however, that its centre had essentially been abandoned. That had been the pivotal event, for it broke the structures that had prevented change in society and had maintained an economic system that could not have been sustained indefinitely anyway. It had hitherto been maintained by building up a debt of environmental and social costs not only in Europe and North America, but in the poorer countries, which had been made increasingly poor, as their populations steadily increased, by the hegemony of the West.
There was a wealth of ideas available that had been denigrated by the economic interests of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but that could now be tested as those interests were discredited by the catastrophic consequences of their actions – brought to such immediate attention by the cyclone. The lessons of history had always been that change was often dramatic, fast and unexpected and the aftermath of 2025 was no exception. One old man in his nineties, then retired to the remote west of Wales, outside the main path of the storm, pointed out a parallel with the workings of ecological systems that he had drawn late in the twentieth century. Societies and systems could exist in very different states. They were maintained for long periods in one of these states by all sorts of stabilising mechanisms, but could be switched by catastrophic events to another, very different one. The cyclone had effectively made such a switch in British society and similar events had triggered parallel changes in other countries too.
His ideas had been formed, among many sources, from research into the ecology of the Broadland in Norfolk and it is thus interesting to document what had begun to happen in the management of this area following the storm. It had been very wet that year in Broadland, devastatingly so in some ways, but the influence of the cyclone had been reduced north of Cambridgeshire. The Broadland rivers had risen very high, but fortunately the floodbanks in the lower reaches had quickly breached and a huge washland, that had been the Halvergate triangle, was able to take much of the water. Damage, although severe in Norwich and Yarmouth, was much less than it might have been. Sea levels had continued to rise in the decades before the cyclone, but fortunately little had been done. It had not been economically feasible to raise or rebuild the banks or to create a flood barrier in the depressed state of British agriculture that had been the consequence of the pervading global market economy and the lack of public confidence engendered by successive abuses of technological farming.
The philosophy of management in Broadland was that used to determine policy throughout the country and increasingly abroad. It rested on several principles. First, because exploitation of fossil fuel reserves had changed the composition of the atmosphere and brought about unpredictable and devastating changes, there should be much more caution in future exploitation of all resources. It could never be certain that any particular activity would be ultimately beneficial to society, so a taxation system had been instituted that minimised environmental disruption by recovering the real costs of associated environmental damage. This had immediately stopped the production of many goods and curbed many activities. It had not, however, had the depressive effect that its twentieth-century critics had scornfully predicted. Ways were found to reuse many materials and the durability of manufactured goods had been increased many fold. Concepts such as planned obsolescence were themselves obsolete and good design, with lasting value, had replaced the fripperies of annually changing fashion.
Matters were helped also by changes in taxation that favoured use of labour rather than of materials. Costs of manufacture were assessed in terms of labour and materials and value-added tax rates increased greatly as the ratio of material to labour costs increased. This had resulted in a move back towards skilled labour and greater employment. It had also resulted in a greater evenness of income and in contentment in the working environment. Many social problems, which had begun to develop in the latter half of the twentieth century and greatly worsened in the two decades prior to the storm, were now much eased.
There had also been a great decline in managerialism. A further change made by the first of the post-emergency governments had been that many decisions should be made locally so that they could be appropriate to local conditions. Most of the former centralised bureaucracies became redundant, whilst the success of an organisation, and hence its future viability, was determined by the support of the workforce as a whole. An organisation wasteful of talent and materials became unprofitable very quickly. The taxation system had also resulted, as had been intended, in an improvement in conditions abroad, especially in the Third World. The costs of imports had increased greatly on account of the high environmental damage tax on air transport and on produce grown by inappropriate intensive cropping systems on tropical soils. Many Third World countries were increasingly able to cope with their rising populations once relieved of the burdens imposed by international economics and the influence of the former multinational corporations, which were dwindling fast. In general they had relied on high turnover of disposable goods and exploitation of cheap labour and they were unable to compete in the changed economies.
The new economy, as it spread worldwide, would gradually lead to a greater atmospheric stability, to fewer threats from globally damaging pollutants, and from such events as the cyclone. The populations, even of that most gullible of nations, the United States, had begun to realise how the propaganda of the previous economies had exploited them in the guise of a ‘good life’ that was ultimately a slavery to powerful marketing interests.
Broadland was managed in a very different way from that which had ever been foreseen. It had changed greatly, and had returned to being a working environment rather than just a museum of the past. The first changes had been felt with the breaching of the floodbanks during the storm. It had been very clear that the capacity of the Halvergate triangle to accommodate water had prevented complete disaster in Norwich and Yarmouth. Some people had nonetheless advocated the re-draining of the floodplains and a return to the grazing marsh landscapes of the past.
However, this would not only have been very expensive, but pointless when the marshes could only be maintained with economic subsidies that were now unacceptable. Loss of the capacity for flood storage under the present climate, when floods could be expected quite often, was a cost that had to be set against the potential profits, if any, of an agricultural regime on the floodplain. There were other ways of using the area that were more sensible. The lower river valleys were allowed to remain as a tidal estuary. At first the water was deep over the whole area, even at low tide, for the former estuarine sediments had shrunk and wasted under several centuries of drainage, but gradually the tides and rivers were bringing in silt and salt marshes were extending at the margins, backed by reedswamps.
Sheep and cattle were proving to be very profitable at the edge of the estuary, for the more hardy breeds, though less productive than some of the highly bred strains of the intensive former systems, required much less in the way of veterinary attention. They thus incurred much lower penalties in terms of tax on the use of antibiotics and other drugs formerly used. Philosophies of increasing agricultural production at any cost were now greatly outmoded and the waste that had been a concomitant of much of the food-processing and retailing industries was eliminated through the taxation system. The ultimate health consequences of former intensive systems had been treated as an environmental cost for taxation purposes and this was resulting in a population much less vulnerable to viral and bacterial diseases or those of unbalanced diet and obesity.
Moreover, the estuary was proving a magnificent area for recreation, being big enough, even at low tide, for a range of boating activities that had been impossible previously for lack of water space. It was windy and could be rough, but that provided a greater interest and excitement. There were funds now to provide very good safety coverage as the costs of other social services such as health and social security had fallen. Of course, in the coming century, the area of open water would decrease as the area of marshes and mud flats increased. They were already providing habitat remote enough to attract back burgeoning wildfowl populations. But projections suggested that when these processes were complete, there would still be a very substantial area of open water.
Attitudes to the land and waterscape had now adjusted to the idea of continuing steady change even without severe human influence, and of adjustment and wise management of the opportunities the change might give. This contrasted with the previous attempts to maintain the status quo of recent memory. For that reason too, there had been no attempt to rebuild those wind pump ruins that had survived the storm. A few were reasonably intact and were made safe and remained as reminders of past history. There was no desire to eliminate history, but to see it in the context of change and adjustment. No longer was it seen as a past golden age, or ideal, and equally the concept that all change induced by human activity was progress had been seen to be false. In one thesaurus of the early twenty-first century, ‘progress’ and ‘marketing opportunity’ had been presented as synonyms.
The second major change in Broadland had been seen in the catchment. There had been a major rethinking about agriculture, for most of its previous practices had been of uncertain long-term value. On the one hand, its use of energy was considerable and fossil fuels had become very expensive as the environmental-damage taxes on their use were high; its previous widespread use of pesticides was also no longer acceptable. Their ultimate health and environmental hazards were considerable, and following the twentieth-century concerns over animal welfare, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and genetic modification, the public was far more discerning than it had been before. The demise of the processing industry had also meant that there was much more emphasis on locally produced and marketed products and much less pressure for high yields at the expense of quality and safety. This had meant that mechanisation had decreased somewhat and that there was greater emphasis on cultivation skills and human labour.
The energy problem had been eased by local generation from renewable sources and quite large wind farms were located offshore just over the horizon whilst small wood- and litter-fed power stations provided much of the rural demand. Energy saving measures had also reduced demand considerably, now that the unit costs of electricity and other energy sources increased rather than decreased, as formerly, with individual annual usage.
The ultimate effect was that rather less land was required for agriculture, that it could be worked much more wisely, that mixed farming systems with both crops and stock had returned, and that transport costs were reduced. There was much more sympathy for the agricultural sector from the public at large, who were now much better informed about the problems of farming in a naturally changing environment. Land was now available to provide wide buffer zones along the rivers and the catchment headwaters and greater involvement of very skilled labour had revolutionised the sophistication of nutrient control within farms.
Stock wastes were treated alongside village sewage and the effluents used for irrigation of crops. Biological control methods, knowledge of crop and weed ecology, crop rotations and use of less productive, but more resistant crop strains had minimised pesticide need to rare emergencies. The water draining from the fields was much lower in nutrients and crop protection residues than it had been for a century. The taxation system had also meant that the water and sewage companies were obliged to find ways of extracting many substances from their effluents, which were regarded as their products, for reuse. They had been obliged to return to a system of small local works to adjust for the variety of substances that came from different areas, rather than having the few, very large, works formerly regarded as profitable, but in fact subsidised by the unpaid costs of considerable environmental damage.
With a less intensive land use, river flows had returned to a more even seasonal pattern and the water quality was much improved. It became feasible to convert the rather worn appearances of the river banks and the formerly turbid waters of Broadland to more diverse and attractive systems. There were some problems in doing this, for return of the former vegetation would hasten the filling-in of the Broads. This was a process that had been going on apace in the early twentieth century, but had been stopped by the combination of eutrophication and boat erosion in the latter part. Filling-in would obliterate basins that had historic significance. On the other hand, the floods of 2025 had opened up considerable areas of water in the floodplains and the topography of the system was no longer entirely what it had been. The basins had sometimes been widened, as rafts of peat had been forced up by the water and carried downstream, whilst in some other places deposition had filled in parts of the basins. The system was now perhaps a little like what it had been some thousands of years ago when the annual floods had created, then removed lagoons, as natural lakes, in the floodplain.
The Trinity Broads, with their small catchment, had changed least. It was decided that they should form the nucleus of an open-air museum that would reflect the story of the Broads and that with judicious cutting at the edges they should be delayed in their eventual succession to wetland. The Thurne system had changed beyond all recognition when the sea broke through the dunes close to Martham Broad at the height of the storm and had returned to an estuary. It was left for much the same reason that the Halvergate estuary was left and now provided a sheltered large inlet where recreational sailing was very popular.
The tides were pushing silt up the new River Thurne and starting to block it a little beyond Potter Heigham Bridge, whose medieval masonry had survived, largely by submergence in deep water, where other more modern and higher bridges had been demolished by floating debris washed from upstream. The bridge was now still partly submerged at high tide and reappeared at the lowest tides. A decision had to be made whether to dredge the blockage or not, but this would have had to be done repeatedly and was perceived as futile opposition to natural processes. Alternatively, the Bure could have been reconnected to the Thurne, as it would have been in all probability at some time in the past, and the increased flow used to prevent the blockage. The consequences of doing this, however, were hard to predict, so on the grounds that so much damage had been done in former centuries by engineering in ignorance, it was decided that the Bure should be left. The Thurne became a separate river and its estuary one of the most delightful quiet spots on the coast. It was surrounded by salt marshes and backed by reed beds and fens, where before there had only been mildly salt and freshwater fens, and was one of the richest areas for wildlife in the region.
The floodplains of the Bure, Yare and Waveney were wetter than formerly. The remaining artificial basins of the Broads were just about discernible, but now had much less distinct edges as vegetation succeeded. By 2050 they were extremely attractive, with great swards of lilies and flowering-rush, but it was accepted that within decades they would be covered by fen and carr. There was considerable controversy about their future and also that of the open fens. These had been formerly maintained artificially by cutting, sometimes for reed, but usually to maintain their ‘conservation value’ by exotic machines, volunteer labour and grazing. There had been a philosophy of conservation that particularly emphasised maintenance of particular communities of plants according to a classification system, the National Vegetation Classification, which recognised particular combinations of species loosely associated with particular conditions.
Much effort had formerly been invested in re-creating or maintaining these communities in nature reserves, with targets and timetables, much as in the running of a business or administrative organisation. It meant that some areas, listed as Sites of Special Scientific Interest and a welter of other designations based on a plethora of legislation, were isolated for ‘conservation’ amid a countryside that was rapidly degrading. It became known as ‘fortress conservation’, began in the mid-twentieth century and failed from the beginning. By 2000, the downward trend in ‘value’ of these sites was clear and calculations showed that most of the 9,000 or so such sites would be severely damaged within 30 or 40 years. It had been a popular system with government, however, for the renovation of such sites, or individual charismatic species, could become the foci of major publicity gains at minimal cost. In the meantime the wider countryside became more damaged, more uniform, less interesting and increasingly vandalised and littered.
The reserves were too small and too isolated for maintenance of diverse communities, without immense attention that amounted to gardening and zoo keeping. Where fresh waters were concerned, it was impossible to manage them because there was no control over the catchments from which their water supplies came. The European Water Framework Directive of 2000 had promised significant change and indeed had done more than any legislation previously. It had prescribed that ‘high’ ecological quality should be characterised for lakes and rivers and then a series of lesser categories defined – good, moderate, poor and bad – dependent on the water quality and nature of the ecosystem, for damaged sites. Within 15 years, all sites had, in theory, to be restored to ‘good’ quality and this meant that national legislation should have been necessary to control catchment use. The problem was, however, that many derogations had been allowable under the Directive so that very few water bodies had been included by the Government as subject to it. It had then been easy to delay new legislation indefinitely, especially with the need for Parliamentary time to counter the increasing social problems that were besetting the country.
Fortress conservation disappeared as a concept after 2025 with the realisation that, indeed, ‘all things were connected’ (a well-known tenet, attributed to a nineteenth-century American Indian chief, though actually written by a twentieth-century scriptwriter, but nonetheless apt). It was perceived that a diverse and interesting landscape could be better maintained incidentally to wise use of the land as a whole. Some species would inevitably decline, even disappear, but many more would flourish and the philosophy became one of sustainable use, rather than preservation of museums. Sustainable use, or as it was generally expressed, ‘sustainable development’ was another twentieth-century slogan manipulated by powerful interests to mean continued exploitation. It was not until 2025 that its real meaning was widely understood. Central government administrative bodies that had previously had sectoral interests in, for example, agriculture or conservation or waste management or water quality on a national basis were disbanded and replaced by single catchment-based organisations charged with sustainable management of their areas. They were of moderate size, sometimes covering a single large catchment, sometimes covering several adjacent smaller ones. The Broadland Catchment Authority was one such.
The Broadland catchment was seen as capable of supporting both farming and tourism in a sustainable way that would also maintain a varied and interesting landscape for casual recreation. The Ant and Bure valleys had had increasing amounts of carr woodland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as the natural vegetation succession had proceeded, following abandonment of grazing and cutting after the Second World War. Some of the fens in the Ant valley, however, had been maintained as open communities and were regularly cut for reed or maintenance of conservation interest. Much of this land use still existed, but for different reasons. The increasing requirement for locally produced food and for husbandry methods that were less intensive than formerly meant that the fens again became grazing pasture in summer.
Water buffalo had been introduced, alongside native cattle, for there was an increasing market for their products in a society that had become increasingly interested in variety that could not now be so readily supplied by imports. Reed was still cut, indeed the areas of reed bed were being extended because the costs of roofing tiles had increased, because of the energy demands for their production and transportation. Reed was a product with a high labour to materials ratio and hence was subject to very low tax. The carr woodlands were now also more actively managed, because local generation of electricity from non-fossil fuels was decidedly cheaper (Plate 29).
Felling created openings that allowed new successions to occur and this maintained a more varied mosaic of habitats than in the past, whilst the Catchment Authority had created a system of management that screened the disturbed areas very skilfully among other compartments that were allowed to remain untouched. Electrically-powered barges were widely used to transport the wood to the power station, where their motors were recharged nightly and this kept open a system of waterways that was of great value to the tourist industry.
Tourism had changed quite markedly. There were still many visitors, for the attractions of sailing and boating on the huge Breydon estuary and on the quieter but still large Thurne estuary were considerable. The particular appeal, however, was the enormous area of attractive countryside for walking, riding and boating that the catchment as a whole offered. Gone were the somewhat tedious holidays when boats moved quickly along river stretches because there was little to hold the interest along eroded banks, or embankments that occluded the view. Speeds were much lower simply because the plant beds and wallowing water buffalo prevented more than a careful manoeuvring in the rivers, but the open waters of the estuary allowed a contrasting opportunity for those who enjoyed the experience (most) to let rip much faster.
Because Broadland had now become a working landscape again, there was much to be seen and a real sense of continuity with the past, which had, paradoxically, been interrupted in the doldrum years between 1960 and 2025. Then its management had largely been one of frantic attempts to preserve items of interest against forces that were inexorable and destructive. Perhaps most important was the acceptance that the global environment was still changing, indeed had always been changing, and that it was generally sensible to work with these changes rather than oppose them all the time. And perhaps most significant was the fact that society as a whole was more settled, more supportive of its own need for stability and contentment and with little use for the baubles that had been the pseudo-rewards for the exploitation that had marked the previous half century or so. It was even the case that the Director of the Broadland Catchment Authority, despite considerable responsibilities, was so well supported by an enthusiastic staff, that she could spend a day every week, out in the fens or on the water, with parties of children truly interested to know about the countryside and how it worked.
AD 34300. The ice was melting back and the archaeologists of the Eurasian Historical Foundation at Valencia in southern Spain had begun their annual summer field work season in the moraines now occupying what had been eastern England. One of the students called over the excavation supervisor to show him some peculiar square blocks of flint, about eight centimetres on edge that seemed to have been chipped into shape. There were three of them, joined by a calcareous mortar that also would prove to have been man-made nearly 33,000 years previously. It was some time before they were identified, because in the upheaval that had brought waves of northern peoples southwards ahead of the ice, almost all of the paper and electronic archives had been destroyed. The southern libraries still held good collections, though, and the blocks turned out to have come from a building, perhaps a Christian church, probably one built by a wealthy patron, sometime around AD 1400. Indeed, in the library there was a good photograph of similar blocks set at the base of a church tower in an area that had been called ‘The Broads’ in a twenty-first-century book of that name.