7
The coast – a success story
A googled, bird’s-eye view of the Mediterranean reveals the devastating impact of tourist development on its once-beautiful coastline. ‘A string of fishing ports . . . the clarity of the mornings, the stillness of the sun-struck monochrome noons, the magic of the scented nights . . . the sky and sea were clear,’ wrote Sybille Bedford in her autobiographical novel Jigsaw in the 1920s, of the stretch of coast between Marseille and Toulon. Today its charm has been sacrificed to dense development and busy roads. Large parts of Turkey, Croatia and Greece are heading in the same direction. Hotels and apartments fight for space with a sea view, beaches are lined with concrete and multi-lane roads carve their way through once remote and picturesque scenery. Yet spin your cursor north and Britain’s coastline is – with exceptions – miraculously free of such incursions. Fields run to the edge of the coast, beaches are lined with blue and green not the grey of buildings, and cliff edges remain gloriously open and accessible. The evidence that the beauty of the British coast has been saved is inspiring and real. Yet it was just in time.
Indeed ‘not a moment too soon’ was the reaction of the local community as we signed the deal on the National Trust’s acquisition of Wembury Point near Plymouth in 2006. A glorious peninsula within sight and sound of the city, Wembury had been occupied by the military since the war, and before that had hosted a holiday camp in the 1930s. Now its derelict buildings, abandoned lookouts and scruffy cliff-edges were surplus to the MOD’s requirements and up for sale. The risk, of course, was that its history made it ripe for re-development, and Plymouth’s housing developers were already eying the potential of this beautiful stretch of coastline. Yet it had other forms of potential too: to be a green lung for the people of Plymouth and to nurture nature. The RSPB was already managing part of the site for the rare cirl bunting, its only breeding ground in South West England, and other parts, though scrubby and overgrown, held huge possibilities for lowland-heath species of plants, birds and reptiles. Offshore, the famous Mewstone (also for sale) was a former prison and smugglers’ hideout. Between the Mewstone and the shore porpoises, basking sharks and seals were frequent visitors. Amid the dilapidated former military buildings, Wembury’s rock pools glittered in the sunlight, and we knew that once opened the whole area would be a delight for walking and wildlife-watching.
We launched an appeal to buy the site in 2005 and it was an immediate success. By 2006 we were in residence, removing the old military buildings or making them safe, improving the habitat and putting in footpaths and a small café.
This was a project for which the National Trust was well prepared. Coastline acquisitions, of beaches, headlands and cliff edges, had been one of our priorities since the 1960s. During my twelve years as Director-General we acquired over 120 miles: just before I left we completed our ownership of the White Cliffs of Dover, iconic symbols of England.
If the British people are known to have a special relationship with landscape and nature, then it is not a big step to explain our fascination with the coast. Somehow the coast has a special place in our sense of identity, perhaps because it encloses the extraordinary diversity and character of our landscape. The coast, too, has played a central role in our history, as both the first line of our defence and our door to the world. Certainly, the coast arouses emotions and passion. It is arguably more written about and celebrated than almost any other feature of our landscape.
There is, of course, no such thing as ‘the’ coast. Like every other part of Britain, our coastline is varied and characterful. The wide sandy beaches of the South and East with their crowded esplanades and kiss-me-quick traditions are a long way, literally as well as metaphorically, from the secretive Fleswick Bay, with its sparkling semi-precious stones, near St Bees’ Head on the Cumbrian coast, or the isolated Po’rth Or on the Llyn Peninsula in north west Wales, where the sands ‘whistle’ as you step on them. Between the sandy coves of Cornwall and Pembrokeshire waves crash against ancient cliffs, sparkling in the sunshine or drenched with rain and looming out of the sea mist. The once black beaches of Durham, the detritus of coal-mining almost gone, now echo the miles of glorious pale sand on the stunning Northumberland coast. Then there are Norfolk’s endless expanses of beach and salt-marsh; the eerie, echoing muddy creeks of south Essex and north Kent, the Thames estuary coasts where Dickens’ vagrants hid; the bumptiousness of Skegness at the end of a long, long road in Lincolnshire; and the industrialised coasts of South Wales or around the ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Harwich and Hull.
No one in Britain lives more than about one hundred miles from the sea, and most of us have vivid memories of seaside holidays and visits. The coast therefore means something to all of us, yet there’s a paradox at the heart of our relationship with it today. Though the coastline of Britain – deeply varied and indented – has played a large role in our island’s story, we no longer think of ourselves as a maritime nation. The relationship most people in Britain have with the coast is occasional and recreational. It is almost as if we have turned our backs on the sea.
Once-dominant activities have declined: the number of fishermen in the UK fell by three-quarters between 1938 and 2011, from 48,000 to a little over 12,000. Ship-building and boat-building, once among Britain’s biggest industries, are confined to a handful of locations. The number of people working in businesses dependent on the sea is now tiny compared with those who earn their living from coastal tourism and leisure.
Yet for millennia the coast was key to the character of Britain, our culture and our development. The sea was, for thousands of years, easier and faster to navigate than land, and the succession of communities who colonised our islands all came by sea. The earliest settlers, after the last Ice Age, came over land bridges that joined us to the continent, mainly in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, attracted by our green and verdant land. Around 6000 bc Britain became separated from continental Europe as sea levels rose, followed by the Neolithic revolution, which marked the beginning of settled agriculture, and further in-migration during the Bronze and Iron Ages.
So the coast was, for many, the point of arrival and dispersal. But it remained important: the Romans, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons were skilled sailors and fishermen whose livelihoods depended on the sea and its products; and their political success derived from their ability to occupy new lands. For the first few centuries ad the cultural and trade links for eastern England were closer to Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia than to the rest of England and Wales; a fact recalled in the remarkable site of Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge on the Suffolk coast, where an early seventh-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman, thought to be King Raedwald, lies buried in his ship along with his weapons and elaborately decorated fighting helmets, accompanied by shield-clad warriors.
For large numbers of people, including those inland, the products of the sea – fish and cetaceans, kelp and other seaweeds, birds’ eggs and some mammals, including seals – were indispensable sources of food and oil. Boat-building was an important industry by late mediaeval times, with ships forming both the frontline of Britain’s defence and the route to discovery, exploration and exploitation of other lands. Farming colonised the coast as it did the interior, but its footprint was lighter: only occasionally did intensive cultivation reach the coastal edge.
For the coast is the place where the underlying geology that shapes our landscape is most clearly visible. Unless it is built over, the coast exposes its bones to view: the ancient granite rocks that form the craggy north and west coasts; the folded sandstones and grits of much of the South West; the Jurassic limestone and chalk cliffs of the South; and the cliffs of glacial waste that are found on the east coast. The coast is an ever-changing place, reflecting the fact that Britain itself is still on the move, our islands gently tipping downwards in a south easterly direction as the tectonic plates on which we stand continue to shift. In fact the coast is the most dynamic element of our landscape. It has grown and shrunk under the influence of natural and (more recently) human forces, and it continues to change today.
Many legends speak of lands lost beneath an encroaching sea: Dogger Bank, off the east coast, hints at the former land bridge with continental Europe and parts of the Isles of Scilly were drowned some 1,500 years ago, giving rise to fables of the lost land of Lyonnesse. From mediaeval times there was talk of a lost ‘Welsh hundred’, Cantref y Gwaelod, thought to have existed in what is now Cardigan Bay, and it is still possible to walk along the exposed Sarns (causeways of boulders contained within boulder clay) into the bay when the tide is right.
The historic loss of land on the east coast of England, particularly in the East Riding of Yorkshire, East Anglia and Kent is well documented. More than thirty settlements on the Holderness Coast that were listed in the Domesday Book have been engulfed by the sea. The Suffolk village of Dunwich is but a shadow of the port that rivalled London before it was lost to erosion in the thirteenth century. The last church to be lost, St Peter’s, in 1912, was recorded in a watercolour by Turner before it succumbed: the bells of Dunwich are still said to toll mournfully in a storm.
If land has been lost by natural processes it has also been gained. There is constant movement along the coast, sometimes very locally and sometimes on a grander scale. Sand, gravel and smaller stones are in continual flux. Beaches rise and fall; sand-dunes accumulate then blow; shingle beds build then scatter; spits build up and then fracture. Land slips into the sea; wave-cut platforms extend the land. Sometimes these natural processes produce extraordinary results: the eighteen-mile long shingle bund of Chesil Beach, its rounded pebbles perfectly graded, getting larger towards Portland; the satisfying roundness of the almost perfect chalk circle that constitutes Lulworth Cove; and the exquisite beauty of the natural arch of the Green Bridge of Wales in Pembrokeshire.
But in recent centuries human intervention has resulted in profound changes to the coast. From mediaeval times onwards this was most often the reclamation of salt marshes for grazing, achieved by enclosures within estuaries, including from the much-diminished Wash and Morecambe Bay. As salt water was excluded by bunds, the land gradually built up enough fertile soil to sustain pasture and sometimes even ploughing. Many of our best-known lowland grazing marshes, including Romney Marsh and the Somerset Levels, were created by this process.
The church was at the forefront of coastal reclamation from the thirteenth century onwards, just as it was in creating the great sheepwalks of northern England: it had a long tradition of using the skills of Dutch engineers even before the famous Vermuyden drained the fens. And if the shoreline moved so could settlements: the port of Harlech in Wales became separated from the sea, while New Winchelsea was rebuilt inland after a terrific storm destroyed its predecessor.
There were many small-scale modifications of the coast, including the formalisation of natural harbours as they were gradually protected and enlarged. At Mullion and Boscastle in Cornwall sea walls were built to protect the harbour against surges and high tides, and natural barriers were reinforced with boulders. All around the coast these improvements ensured safe harbours, landing places and transport links for the fishing industry to land and get its products to market. Safety at sea was important too: during the seventeenth century local arrangements for warning of dangers at sea were taken over by Trinity House, whose distinctive lighthouses – no longer manned – stand with a striking beauty around our coasts today.
The great ports were at the forefront of Britain’s population growth and industrialisation by the eighteenth century, establishing vast enclosed harbours, wet and dry docks, fish landing and processing apparatus, transport hubs and all the paraphernalia and activity associated with the mass movement of people and goods. These coastal towns were noisy, dirty and smelly but full of life and excitement; the whole world came to the streets around their harbours and docks.
The Georgian seaside resorts grew rapidly in popularity as the fashion for sea-bathing and fresh-air cures caught on in the eighteenth century, led by Royalty. The resorts, especially as they expanded in Victorian times, were sea-colonisers too, because as well as hotels, boarding houses, promenades and theatres they constructed piers and esplanades whose fingers extended into the ocean, giving people the experience of raw weather, sights and smells that the land alone could not provide.
By the nineteenth century ambitions for coastal reclamation were resurgent again, and construction works claimed land for building and farming in the Ribble, Tees and Dee Estuaries, and on low-lying land around Cardiff and Bristol. These supported the development of major cities, providing land for generating power, canals, railways and industrial sites. For along with its intrinsic qualities the coast provided convenient transport corridors, access to water for cooling power stations and locations for infrastructure for ports.
But it was when industrial energies faded and the coast became a magnet for retirement living, holidays and tourism that the voice for the defence of its beauty was stirred. As a nation we both discovered the coast anew and began to destroy it.
The very first gift of land to the National Trust, in 1895, was the few acres of land looking out to sea above Barmouth in North Wales. And it was given by Fanny Talbot specifically to curtail Barmouth’s expansion and ‘avoid the abomination of asphalt paths and the cast-iron seats of serpent design’. Dinas Oleu, the Fortress of Light, represented all that Octavia Hill had dreamed of for the new Trust: ‘It is delightful to think that one beautiful sea-cliff has already been given – a bit of British coast held in trust for the nation. Will there be more such gifts to record this time next year?’ she wrote in her Letters to Fellow Workers in 1894.
The National Trust’s first acquisition was the coastal plot of Dinas Oleu above Barmouth, given by Fanny Talbot. (Courtesy of the National Trust/Joe Cornish)
There were, because the need for coastal protection was already apparent. The early countryside campaigners were appalled by the dismal quality of much development on the coast. And the shanty town of Peacehaven epitomised the worst of it. It began as a speculative purchase of land above chalk cliffs in the parish of Piddinghoe near Lewes on the south coast by a showman, Charles Neville, in 1916. His company advertised plots for sale in the Daily Express, and invited the public to enter a competition to name the new town. The winner (the name Peacehaven was suggested by Ethel Radford from Leicestershire) won her plot, but his trick was to offer ‘free’ plots of land to the runners-up, conditional on payment of a stiff conveyancing fee. Eighty thousand people entered the competition and he declared over 2,500 of them runners-up, landing himself a small fortune. The Daily Express sued him, challenging his proposition as a scam and it eventually won the legal case, but the publicity brought thousands of willing colonisers. By 1924 around three thousand people had constructed ramshackle dwellings, made from whatever material they could find: old railway carriages, army huts and lean-tos, like the ‘plotlands’ movement of the same period which saw people throughout Britain occupying and building cheap homes on unused land.
Peacehaven’s development story was unusual but the desire to live on the coast was not. The health-giving benefits of the sea air, combined with relatively cheap land, meant that developers were quick to spot an opportunity. Neville himself went on to build the settlements of Saltdean and parts of Rottingdean, and many others followed, leaving Cyril Joad in The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country (1945) to note despairingly, ‘The south coast along the greater part of its length is already done for.’
Peacehaven on England’s south coast was the first example of coastal sprawl and triggered the fight for coastal protection.
CPRE led the campaign for better coastal protection by commissioning a report on the coast and the damage that was being caused by unplanned development from Wesley Dougill, a planner from Liverpool University, which it published in 1936. He wrote ‘we are witnessing today what can be termed without exaggeration a national movement seawards. As a result of it the seaboard is being quickly built up.’ By 1942 the Commons Preservation Society had set up a Coastal Preservation Committee and was lobbying hard, giving evidence along with CPRE to the Scott Committee, urging greater controls. The Scott Committee noted the establishment of ‘permanent and semi-permanent camps for urban populations on holiday’ of which ‘several hundred had been set up before 1939’. Its general view was that the coasts should be used for recreation, viewing ‘with favour . . . the further provision of . . . commercial holiday camps and holiday villages’, but it recognised that this policy needed to be applied with care, because of the risk to beautiful coastlines. Therefore the wartime government commissioned J. Alfred Steers, a lecturer in geography at Cambridge University, to survey the coast and identify the areas of greatest scenic quality. His report, drawing on his personal survey of most of the coastline of England and Wales, was published in 1946 and was the first strategic review of the coast.
In addition to controlling coastal sprawl the campaigners wanted to reduce the military occupation of large sections of the coast, since the Ministry of Defence’s landholdings had doubled from 225,000 acres in 1939 to over 550,000 acres by 1960, involving the construction of ugly buildings and numerous fortifications, as well as barbed wire fences that excluded the public. As late as 1967 the MOD still occupied 134 miles of coastline, including long lengths in Kent, Cornwall, Dorset, Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, Lincolnshire, Suffolk and Essex.
Following the 1949 Act the beauty of the coast had an official champion in the National Parks Commission, and for its scientific value the Nature Conservancy. The National Parks Commission was acutely conscious of the threats, and it was no accident that its first tranche of ten National Parks in the 1950s included some important coastlines: Pembrokeshire was designated almost entirely because of its coast, and significant parts of Exmoor and the North York Moors, and smaller parts of Snowdonia and the Lake District are coastal. Gower, a stunning coastal landscape and habitat in South Wales, was the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to be designated in 1956, and others with striking coastlines followed, especially the Northumberland Coast (in 1958), much of Cornwall (in 1959; to some people’s disappointment, because it had been an early candidate for a National Park) and the North Devon Coast (in 1959).
But these designations left large areas of coastline unprotected and vulnerable to unplanned sprawl. And although the National Trust had begun to acquire coastline, especially in Cornwall (its earliest property there was Tintagel’s Barras Nose in 1897, and many other small stretches followed in the 1930s and 1940s), it was only expected to make a tiny contribution. Something needed to be done. By the early 1960s a deputation from CPRE’s Coastal Committee had convinced the Minister of Housing and Local Government that there was a serious problem. As a first step the Ministry issued a Circular, in 1963, asking local authorities to initiate studies of the coast, to safeguard natural beauty and mitigate or remove eyesores. By 1966 the National Parks Commission had persuaded the Ministry to launch the largest-ever study of the coast and the planning issues affecting it. The Commission convened nine regional conferences bringing together all the affected bodies, land-based and maritime, and drew up maps and data covering the entire coast of England and Wales. Its purpose was unambiguous: to protect the beauty of the coast, as John Cripps, the Chairman of the (by then) Countryside Commission wrote when presenting the report to Ministers: ‘the money and changes [we recommend] are needed to ensure both that we provide better for present requirements and that we shall be able to pass on to those who come after us this vital part of our national heritage conserved and enhanced, not further despoiled.’
Though the exercise concluded that ‘only’ a quarter of the coast of England and Wales was already developed or earmarked for development, it marked a determination to protect what was left, for it was undoubtedly under threat. The report pinpointed the main problem: the new car-based mobility and dispersal of holiday-makers and their increasingly diverse demands for all kinds of recreation – sailing, canoeing, water skiing, motor-boating, diving and swimming. Whereas once people had taken a train to a large resort for a conventional beach holiday, now they could travel wherever a road could take them. Caravans were the source of much attention: from being so unusual in 1951 that their numbers were not even recorded in the British Travel Association’s annual survey, by 1955 they were used by two million holiday-makers and by 1967 4.5 million. The number of day trippers was expanding even more rapidly than those taking holidays. But dispersal was the main worry, for with it came pressure for holiday camps and chalets, car parks, golf courses and other recreational facilities and new roads.
The Commission also looked at other problems facing the coast. The resorts were beginning their long decline because they no longer met the needs of the increasingly mobile and more demanding tourists. The Commission also described the scourge of coastal eyesores, even in National Parks: ugly caravan sites, derelict land, dumped industrial spoil and abandoned military buildings. Some coastal areas were scarred by established industrial development, such as refineries, chemical processing plants, aluminium smelters and steel mills, and new threats were appearing in the form of exploration for oil and gas, new power stations and plans for port expansion.
From the 1950s onwards the popularity of caravans brought new questions about how the coast could be protected. (Courtesy of the National Trust/John Miller)
The Commission came up with commendably clear solutions. New planning policies should be devised specifically for the coast, both to determine the scope and quality of development where it was needed, and to ensure that beautiful and still-undeveloped stretches of coastline were protected from inappropriate changes. Industrial coasts were to be defined and contained, and where there were competing pressures local authorities should be given the means to reconcile the claims for recreation, commercial development, nature conservation and quiet enjoyment.
The Commission proposed extending the then innovative proposals for ‘management agreements’ between private landowners and public bodies, so that the most beautiful lengths of unspoiled coast would continue in the uses (mostly low-density grazing) that made them so valued. To protect these, they recommended a new designation, Heritage Coasts, where planning policies would be strictly applied and low-key public access and sympathetic land management would be encouraged.
Many local authorities were ready to adopt these recommendations as part of their own planning processes, but the Heritage Coasts plan needed the government’s endorsement. It gave it, but not as a statutory planning designation. It was left to the Countryside Commission to persuade local authorities to adopt the idea, which the Commission encouraged with funding for Heritage Coast Officers and the preparation of management plans. To kick-start the process the Commission ran pilots in Suffolk, Purbeck and Glamorgan between 1974 and 1977. They were such a success that by 1980 nineteen English Heritage Coasts were in place, with a further five in the 1980s, seven in the 1990s and one in 2001, some of course overlapping with existing National Parks and AONBs. In the same period fourteen were designated in Wales. In total a third of the coastline of England and Wales has been designated as Heritage Coast. And the National Trust now owns about forty per cent of it.
By the 1960s the National Trust was thinking seriously about its own contribution from coastal protection. It was by then a very different organisation from the one its founders had set up, and was heavily loaded with the weight of taking on as many as a dozen country houses a year. It might have been forgiven for thinking it had enough on its plate. But the threat of a rapidly suburbanising coastline resonated within the National Trust and its resulting campaign, Enterprise Neptune, launched in 1965, was arguably the Trust’s most proactive and influential ever.
Dinas Oleu had, as Octavia Hill hoped, been followed by other coastal properties and by 1960 the Trust owned about 175 miles of coastline, including the Farne Islands (acquired in 1925), Tennyson Down on the Isle of Wight (1927) and, from the 1940s, White Park Bay and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. But the Neptune campaign represented an altogether more strategic approach to the challenge of coastal protection.
The idea for Neptune is attributed to Christopher Gibbs, who in 1962 was the new Chief Agent. He had already saved a number of precious stretches of coastline in Pembrokeshire, witnessing there desperate pressures for commercialisation of the coast: holiday parks and bungalows, caravans and chalets, industrial development and military equipment, much of it within the newly created Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. But he was backed by an even more powerful advocate, Lord Antrim, who was the Trust’s Northern Ireland Chairman and a passionate defender of the Antrim coast. He had launched and led the Ulster Coastline Appeal, and on the strength of its success was instrumental in the preparations for a Trust-wide role. By 1965 he was Chairman of the whole National Trust, and it was no surprise that the Trust’s Executive Committee was persuaded to launch a national appeal to buy up coastline around the whole perimeter of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The idea came none too soon. The Trust estimated that about five miles of coastline were being built on each year, particularly near popular holiday destinations. Gibbs asked Trust agents around the country for a rough assessment of how much of the coast was worth protecting. In reply they guessed about a third, and with that ball-park figure in mind the decision to launch the campaign was made.
The Trust’s Council, however, wanted to know more precisely where and what the Trust should seek to acquire. Conveniently one of the greatest authorities on the British coastline, the now Professor Alfred Steers, was a member of its Estates Committee. Steers recommended a new survey and the Trust commissioned Dr John Whittow, a young geography lecturer at Reading University, to carry it out: he estimated that they would need to cover over three thousand miles to complete their work around the coasts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Gathering together a group of thirty-four graduate students and three lecturers from his department, Whittow and his colleagues spent the summer of 1965 mapping the coast. They worked quickly on this mammoth task, on a shoestring budget, and to a simple formula.
First they categorised land use into one of fourteen categories, which were hand-drawn onto maps. When Whittow brought the maps together, he consolidated the information into just three categories: land beyond redemption (usually because it had been built on); land which was managed and in active use (including by the Ministry of Defence) but could possibly be restored in future; and land which was free from development and therefore a target for protection. On the basis of these maps around nine hundred miles were identified as pristine, in need of protection and therefore ideally to be acquired, and the Trust adopted this as its target. It was remarkably close to the agents’ original guess.
These nine hundred miles were astonishingly beautiful. They included most of England’s South West peninsula, much of the coastline of Wales, North West England and Northern Ireland, especially Antrim. Northumberland’s beautiful beaches were also on the list, along with much of what remained undeveloped along the south coast. The least promising areas, recalled John Whittow many years later, were ‘the East Anglian coast, a low-lying coastline with an enormous number of caravan parks and holiday villages . . . the entire coastal area south of Brean Down in the south west coast was also overwhelmed.’ But in his recommendations to the Trust only that which was irretrievably lost, or utterly safe, was excluded. And from the moment the target was adopted, Neptune became central to the Trust’s ambitions. It was an extremely popular campaign, externally and internally. Some regional agents, with Cornwall’s Michael Trinick in the vanguard, never missed a chance to acquire a stretch of coastline that could be looked after by the Trust. Stories abound: on one occasion the agent for South Wales, Hugh Griffiths, confessed, after showing a series of beautiful slides to an admittedly sympathetic Estates Committee, that he had in fact already sealed the deal. Another story suggests that the slides that were used to dazzle the committee were, always, the same ones.
The audacity of the Neptune campaign was astounding. It was deeply ambitious for a modest-sized charity to set out to acquire nine hundred miles of coastline, yet the Trust was undaunted. Partly this was because it was so buoyed up by popular support: its willingness to take risks, plan ambitiously and for the long term, make commitments and acquire beautiful, vulnerable coastline generated a massive and positive public response. The risks paid off and Neptune’s popularity made a significant contribution to the growth in the National Trust’s membership from 158,000 in 1965 to 540,000 only a decade later. Unprecedented support came too from official bodies: the government agreed to match the Trust’s initial Neptune fundraising appeal pound for pound, and many local authorities donated land and money to the Trust.
Neptune had a bigger impact too. In fact it played an important role in the re-democratisation of the Trust because this was a new style of acquisition. Almost all the land acquired was made immediately available for public access, benefiting millions of people including non-members. This was both philanthropic and, to some, demonstrably closer to the founders’ vision than the acquisition of the country houses of the rich. Paid for by readily offered legacies and gifts (and needing much smaller endowments than built properties) the coastal estate built up rapidly. Within four years of Neptune’s launch one hundred miles had been added to the Trust’s coastal estate; by 1980 Neptune had funded a further 220 miles. In 2015 it stood at 775 miles, within touching distance of the original nine hundred mile target.
A frightful row about Neptune, one of the biggest in the Trust’s history, brought further pressure for democracy. The catalyst was the Trust’s first professional fundraiser, Commander Conrad Rawnsley (grandson of the founder Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley), who was brought in to lead the Neptune appeal. However his proactive, combative style ran counter to the more cautious approach of the Trust’s leaders, and he wanted both to spend more money on the campaign and to make progress faster. With relationships already tense, they fell out spectacularly following Rawnsley’s public criticisms of the Trust at a press conference he called at Saltram near Plymouth, where because of its failure to back his fundraising methods he called the Trust ‘inert and amorphous’, condemning the ‘old boy net’ by which it was run and, most damaging of all, describing it as ‘incompetent’. It was, he said, ‘Bankrupt in ideas, bankrupt in leadership, bankrupt in the common touch, bankrupt in its sense of what the people need and in the alacrity with which it set about providing it’. The Extraordinary General Meeting that followed his sacking in 1967 led to a review of relationships with members and, eventually, to a more open and responsive National Trust. But though the row was painful and embarrassing it did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of the public and the Trust’s members for the Neptune campaign.
This was because the Trust did what it said it would: it bought land, stopped ugly development and cared for hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline and the historic structures associated with it. For a coastal visitor today the sight of a National Trust sign welcoming visitors is an indication of quality, certainty and good management. And sometimes it is even more than a force for protection. The so-called Black Beaches of the Durham coast were acquired in 1988 and symbolically named as the campaign’s five-hundredth mile under the leadership of Oliver Maurice, then Director for the North East. It was the first stretch of degraded coastline to be purchased for the purpose of improvement, not protection – those beaches had not been on John Whittow’s maps.
The mines of the Durham coalfields had for decades tipped their spoil on the cliffs, covering the beaches with a foul shroud of black waste. But by the 1980s the coalfields were closing, and Maurice saw the potential for the beaches to recover their lost beauty. Working in partnership with the local authorities and, in an inspired move, appointing ex-miner Denis Rooney as the Trust’s first head warden there, time and tide are gradually but systematically washing the beaches clean. It is a renaissance which has been recognised nationally and beyond, with the Durham Coast being given Heritage Coast status in 2001; in 2010 the project was declared the Winner of the UK Landscape Award and the UK nomination for the European Landscape Award.
But the beauty of the coastline is not just about its aesthetic and cultural appeal. The coastline is just as important for its wildlife. The National Parks Commission’s 1966 study calculated that nearly 540 miles of the coastline of England and Wales were designated under the 1949 Act either as a National Nature Reserve, SSSI (450 miles, the vast bulk) or local nature reserve. And nature conservation is just as important out to sea as on land, but here progress lagged well behind. As late as 1977 the Nature Conservancy Council’s seminal Nature Conservation Review looked no further to sea than the intertidal zone of estuaries; and it was not until 1979 that specific measures for marine conservation were recommended when it jointly published a report with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC): Nature Conservation in the Marine Environment.
Scientists had been alerted to the need to protect the marine environment by the oil-polluting wreck of the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and as the fashion for scuba-diving revealed the wealth of Britain’s underwater wildlife. From the 1960s local naturalists had pressed the case for protection of ‘underwater reserves’ for Skomer Island in West Wales, Kimmeridge Bay in Dorset, Wembury near Plymouth, the Farne Islands in Northumberland and St Anthony’s Head near Falmouth. Lundy was proposed as a voluntary marine reserve in 1971 but the first and only local nature reserve established specifically to protect marine biology was in 1973 by Torbay Borough Council, at Saltern Cove in south Devon.
Disappointed by the failure to follow this with protection of other marine sites, the voluntary bodies lobbied for and succeeded in getting the ability to declare marine nature reserves in the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. But by 1983 none had been created and the NCC reported to the World Conservation Strategy that ‘marine ecosystems are the Cinderella of nature conservation in Britain’. Lundy was a particular problem: though it has the finest diversity of any marine site in the UK, with a multitude of sea squirts, starfish, colourful jellyfish, sponges, pink sea fans, Devonshire cup corals as well as basking sharks, dolphins and grey seals, by the 1980s it was badly over-fished, its coral reefs were damaged and its native fish populations had plummeted.
Though evidence was amassing country-wide that sea life was declining catastrophically, it was happening offshore and almost invisibly, and there were strong counter-voices, especially from the fisheries industry, to any attempts to constrain commercial activities.
The Nature Conservancy’s 1984 Nature Conservation in Great Britain finally brought some progress when the seas around Lundy were designated as a marine nature reserve in 1986, followed by Skomer in 1990 and, much later, Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland (1995). It is also proposed to designate the Menai Strait in North Wales. But even with the agreement in 1992 of both OSPAR (Oslo and Paris Conventions for the Protection of the Marine Environment for the North East Atlantic) and the European Union’s Habitats Directive (containing provisions for marine protection) it was not until the late 1990s that the government drew up plans for Special Areas of Conservation for marine habitats, and not until 2002 that it accepted the case for a more strategic approach to marine conservation in Safeguarding our Seas: A Strategy for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of our Marine Environment. It took until 2004 for the long-advocated ‘no take’ zone around Lundy to be implemented.
Though the role of official bodies was important, the campaign to expose the crisis facing marine wildlife was led by the voluntary bodies, including The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, WWF and Marine Conservation Society, working through Wildlife Link to add weight to their efforts. Campaign after campaign was launched, including The Wildlife Trusts’ Our Dying Seas which documented the extent of marine losses, and raised high profile objections to fishing by-catches, especially dolphins trapped in fishing nets. Basking sharks were tagged to highlight their distribution and vulnerability; campaigns were launched with chefs and supermarkets to encourage consumers to buy and eat fish only from sustainable sources; and profile-raising efforts including ‘fish-scale’ petitions calling for a Marine Bill were used to sustain the lobbying effort.
The slow progress was doubly frustrating because it had been known for many years that over-fishing was a serious problem. Emerging from the local, sustainable industry that had occupied many coastal communities for hundreds of years, the commercial fishing fleets that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took fishing to new levels and by the 1970s there were clear signs of over-fishing. In British shores, mackerel was the first species whose decline was noted, but by 2000 cod, haddock and plaice had been so aggressively fished that their numbers crashed, especially in the North Sea. Tensions between nations over fishing grounds grew, and once again the European Commission was the broker for action. The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is as old as the Common Agricultural Policy and had similar objectives to support productive fisheries, although it always had a theoretical responsibility to preserve fish stocks. Overfishing and dramatic declines in catches eventually forced a reconsideration of the CFP, with controls being introduced for the first time in 2007 and more ambitiously in 2010. Fish stocks are now beginning to recover, helped by consumer pressure encouraged by bodies like the Marine Conservation Society, which tells consumers whether the fish they are buying are from sustainable sources.
A similar battle was fought, and gradually won, over marine pollution. Again, the disastrous oil spill from the Torrey Canyon in 1967 brought the issue to public attention, leading to international agreements such as the London Dumping Convention of 1972. More widespread was the problem of localised pollution, including the discharge of raw sewage into the sea which continued until the 1970s. The European Commission’s 1976 Bathing Water Directive was an early attempt to clean up the sea, focusing especially on beaches where people bathed and paddled. The Blue Flag campaign originated in France in 1985 to reward municipalities for complying with sewage treatment and bathing water quality standards. It spread throughout Europe, and the sight of a blue flag flying at a beach remains a valuable form of public reassurance today. In Britain the Blue Flag campaign was supplemented in 1990 by a new organisation, Surfers Against Sewage. Its members took radical action, publicising filthy beaches and polluted water by wearing gas masks and dumping in Parliament inflatable models of the unmentionable sewage-related objects that ruined the enjoyment of their sport. Our beaches are in better condition thanks to their action, and more recently they have joined the campaign for coastal protection, recognising the joys of surfing in a beautiful as well as a clean environment. Inspired by their work, in 2000 the National Trust employed a former surf champion, Robyn Davies, to run surf classes on the Cornwall coast, helping visitors to see the connection between looking after the coast and being able to enjoy it.
While our beaches have become less polluted, we still face the more pervasive and insidious threat of litter and plastic waste, and this fight has not yet been won. Surfers Against Sewage reported in 2012 that the volume of litter washing up on British beaches had almost doubled in fifteen years. The Marine Conservation Society’s annual survey in the same year reported that over forty per cent was public waste: discarded plastic bottles, broken glass and empty cans, and general rubbish. Fourteen per cent was fishing related and nearly five per cent sewage-related. More than thirty per cent was from unidentified sources, assumed to have been dumped by sea vessels either accidentally or deliberately. The consequences are serious: apart from the health risks and the damage to people’s enjoyment, plastics may never fully break down and will remain in microscopic form for thousands of years, causing injury to fish, birds and mammals.
Though the challenges were daunting and remain so, the story of coastal protection has been one of steadily growing success. But it reveals more clearly than any other element of the fight for beauty that success is not about holding things static, but is a constant process of managing change. The National Trust discovered this with a vengeance in the early 1990s.
In the early 1980s it had bought some land, a hotel and three of half a dozen 1840s cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, in the hamlet of Birling Gap on the Sussex coast, near the iconic Seven Sisters cliffs. These chalk cliffs had long been slowly, though unpredictably, crumbling into the sea at a rate of about a metre a year. Knowing this, the Trust had initially planned to demolish the buildings and let nature take its course, but it ran up against local opposition. Eventually the Trust agreed to keep the hotel going as long as it was viable, but it could not guarantee to protect the cottages; indeed the one nearest the edge of the cliff had to be demolished in 1996. A fierce local campaign ensued, with locals pressing the Trust to install coastal defences to protect the remaining cottages and the hotel. As (then) a member of the Trust’s Council, I supported the Trust’s decision to resist pressures to try to hold the site static. Not only was this physically impossible, it ran counter to any sensible view of the future, since further losses of the cliff would be inevitable.
Birling Gap, seen here with temporary access arrangements, where erosion threatens the viability of living and working near the cliff edge. (Courtesy of the National Trust/David Sellman)
In 2000, just before I joined the staff, an emotional public inquiry had taken place, with local people arguing for coastal defences to be constructed to protect the cliff, accusing the Trust of being blind to their views. The Trust stuck to its position, though it was painfully aware of the strength of local feeling. In the end the Trust ‘won’ the public inquiry because the Inspector agreed that one day, regardless of any defence scheme, the cottages would fall into the sea. It was a distressing lesson in public and community relations, from which we learned much.
It was soon clear that we could face similar situations all around the coast. At Studland, in east Dorset, the Trust had to move the beach huts back twice in ten years as the beach retreated by two or three metres a year. Further west, the footpath at Golden Cap had to be moved back twenty-five metres from the cliff edge to accommodate erosion. A severe storm at Formby on the Lancashire coast took twelve to fifteen metres of sand off the beach, dumping it miles along the coast. At Mullion Cove, in Cornwall, the cost of repairs to the mediaeval harbour, increasingly battered by storms, was becoming unsustainable: by 2005 the Trust had spent £1 million on repairs since 1990.
Other rows were brewing too. A few miles west of Birling Gap, the Cuckmere River reaches the sea at Cuckmere Haven. Here is another group of coastguard’s cottages, sitting picturesquely against the backdrop of the undulating white Seven Sisters cliffs: it is one of the most photographed views in England. Nobody would build cottages there today: they perch on the edge of the rapidly eroding cliff and have been uninsurable for years. They are vulnerable, yet unsurprisingly their owners love them and believe they should be defended. Expensive, concrete-pouring solutions have long been advocated in attempts to stabilise the coast. But even if such solutions could protect the cottages (and that is doubtful, for long), it would not be the end of the matter. ‘Hard’ coastal defences would deflect the force of the waves elsewhere, possibly causing greater damage.
Instead the Trust wanted to do something much more modest and, we hoped, more in tune with nature. For despite appearances the Cuckmere estuary is far from a natural place. The meandering river is a contained force, bounded by green fields which were reclaimed from the sea after the Second World War. Where the river meets the sea there is a large bund which is vulnerable to being breached in a storm surge. Though it provides some security for the grazing land and the cottages now one day it will fail, the estuary will flood, and the cottages will almost certainly be lost.
The Trust’s idea was to create a small breach in the bund, allowing the sea to invade the land intermittently and in a managed way. This would, in time, re-create the salt marsh that pre-dates the grazing land, helping to contain and manage future seawater inundations. The landscape would be returned to a more natural state, accommodating all but the most severe storm surges, and there would be no need for major construction works. But though this solution would provide modest protection for the cottages the Trust could not guarantee their long-term survival.
Though it seemed the right thing to do, there were objections. The cottage owners were unhappy, and some local people were concerned that the restored salt marshes would be a less attractive and accessible landscape than the improved grassland. We had a similar experience at Cotehele, in Cornwall, where we proposed the re-creation of salt marsh to provide a natural buffer against tidal surges on the river Tamar. Local objectors preferred the improved grassland to salt marsh, and the project stalled. And at Cuckmere we failed to convince the Environment Agency so, for now, the status quo remains.
Faced with an accelerating number of challenges around the coast, and increasingly concerned that climate change might be exacerbating the speed of change, we commissioned a risk assessment of our entire coastal estate. Published in 2005, Shifting Shores demanded action by us and others. For it showed, beyond question, the extent to which our coasts were changing; and that in certain places, especially in Dorset, Sussex, much of East Anglia and Yorkshire, we should expect even more dramatic changes over the next twenty years. Ten years later, a revisiting of the same sites has confirmed the predictions.
In response to these findings we agreed that it made no sense to fight the rising sea or treat it as an enemy against which we had to defend ourselves: instead we should take a strategic, long-term view, working with nature rather than against it. This meant accepting the inevitability of change. Many of the nation’s most distinctive coastal landmarks, some of which the Trust owns, such as the Needles on the Isle of Wight or Old Harry Rocks near Studland, were created by coastal erosion and one day would be lost to coastal erosion. We had to accept that we could not hold the coastline still. This meant challenging the assumption that the Trust’s job was to keep things as they are, or were when we acquired them.
The effects of climate change were clear: we found evidence both of sea level rise and an increasing risk of extreme events. Our coastal risk study drew together all the available information from the Environment Agency’s Indicative Flood Risk Maps, DEFRA’s FutureCoast initiative and the UK Climate Impact Programme’s predictions of sea level rise. It concluded that over the coming century 169 sites along some 608 km (sixty per cent) of National Trust-owned coastline could lose land through coastal erosion; and that some losses might be significant, involving as much as between one and two hundred metres of erosion. A further 126 sites covering over four thousand hectares were found to be already at risk from tidal flooding, and thirty-three more low-lying sites would be at risk over the coming century. Those affected include Blakeney on the north Norfolk coast, Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, Northey Island in the Blackwater estuary, East Head near Chichester Harbour, West Wight on the Isle of Wight, Golden Cap in Dorset, Porlock on the north Somerset coast, Westbury Court Garden, a seventeenth-century Dutch-style garden in the River Severn floodplain, Llanrhidian Marsh near Swansea and Formby Sands north of Liverpool.
A further factor influencing our decisions was that hard sea defences are not only expensive but can have unpredictable side effects. The Trust owns the spit, East Head, on the west Sussex coast at the entrance to Chichester Harbour. This has long been starved of a steady supply of sand and shingle by the hard defences built to protect housing on the Manhood peninsula (East and West Wittering and Selsey) and is now regularly breached. So rather than invest in hard defences ourselves, we promoted a strategy of sensitive adaptation, adjusting to natural forces as they occurred. So at Formby Sands we moved the car park to the back of the dunes, where it would not disturb the natural processes of shifting dunes, and we re-routed the Sefton coastal path. At Porlock in Somerset we created a new salt marsh, which now attracts waders, ducks and plants that had previously been only rare visitors; otters have moved in and people enjoy the wildlife.
But if the dynamism of coastal protection poses a significant challenge, so too does the reconciliation of aesthetic concerns with the generation of renewable energy. Modern wind turbines were rare in Britain until the turn of the twenty-first century, though windmills have been part of the rural scene for hundreds of years. A new generation of wind turbines has been steadily appearing, and under the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, agreed in 2009, the UK must meet fifteen per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. This led to a boost in subsidies for renewable energy, though some of these were controversially dropped in 2015.
Since the coast is windier than many inland locations, it is in many ways an obvious place to start. The Crown Estate, which manages Britain’s seabed from the coast out to the twelve-mile nautical limit and is responsible for licences, has played a big role in stimulating coastal renewable energy. And after a slow start development is now rapid: under licence from the Crown Estate there are currently over one thousand wind turbines with a capacity of over 4,250 MW, and capacity for another 27,000 MW has been consented or is under construction, including on Dogger Bank and in the North Sea. The Crown Estate reports that four per cent of Britain’s energy is now met by wind generation, and that on a particularly windy day in early 2015 wind farms met twenty per cent of the UK’s energy need. Large offshore wind farms have already been built off the north coast of Wales, near the Dee estuary, and off the Essex, north Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cumbria coasts. Many on-shore wind turbines have also been installed: many have been disputed but it has also proved possible to position turbines carefully to avoid damage to landscapes.
Wind turbines on land and at sea are vital sources of clean energy. They can harm beauty but not if we locate and design them well. (Courtesy of the National Trust/Joe Cornish)
Renewable energy is clearly a vital part of our response to climate change, but the location of wind turbines can be problematic for the landscape and nature protection movement, because of their visual impact and the risk of bird strikes, particularly on migration routes. The National Trust has struggled to reconcile its deeply embedded concern for protecting beautiful landscapes with its equally profound commitment to the ‘permanent preservation’ of our environment, which requires a responsible approach to resource management. Sometimes there are straightforward clashes: I was glad when the proposed South West array in the Bristol Channel, very close to Lundy, a place I love, was dropped for financial reasons. But if we are to take climate change seriously, as we must, renewable energy generation must play a significant role, and we must seek designs and locations that are compatible with beauty. This is not impossible: the National Trust has shown how many smaller-scale renewable projects, from wood fuelled boilers to mini hydro-generation, small wind turbines and the installation of solar panels on roofs can be happily reconciled with aesthetic concerns and cumulatively can make a significant contribution to energy generation. A single, beautifully designed hydro-electric scheme in Snowdonia supplies enough electricity to light the entire National Trust estate in Wales; and renewable energy generated on Trust properties in Northern Ireland produces twenty-two per cent of the Trust’s total energy demands there.
It is the vast wind farms that dominate the skyline in all directions that trouble those who love beauty, but there are places where wind turbines can be located without harm to treasured landscapes. And the solution, surely, is not to ignore questions of beauty or dismiss them, but to debate the issues, openly exploring designs and seeking places where installations for renewable energy can respect our long-held commitments to landscape and nature protection. We need to find places where wind turbines can sit comfortably in the landscape, and develop technologies such as wave power, solar generation and the extraction of thermal power from the sea, all of which have great potential. Encouragingly there is a growing number of studies commissioned by National Parks, AONBs and Heritage Coasts to identify where and how (and where not) renewable technologies can be accommodated without damaging the spirit and quality of these special places.
Our coastline, therefore, continues to be a place of which new demands are made and where new challenges are posed. But we have learned that above all else we need to plan for its future in a more joined-up way. We can accommodate appropriate change if we know what we are trying to achieve. And a long-term vision for the coast is becoming clear. It should be a place for creative conservation, not exploitation. Many local authorities and conservation bodies are now promoting Integrated Coastal Zone Management, an approach that looks at the coast in the round and tries to plan for all its needs in a harmonised way. The New Economics Foundation has proposed a ‘Blue New Deal’ to support economic activities on the coast that create jobs and support conservation aims. And nationally the government accepted the challenge and passed the Marine and Coastal Access Act in 2009, with the aim of ‘ensuring the clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse oceans and seas by putting in place a new system for improved management and protection of the marine and coastal environment’. Proper, effective marine protection is being extended – Marine Conservations Zones now protect twenty per cent of English waters – so finally the slow, grudging historical pace of marine conservation is being put right.
With these, and the earlier advances made in protection of the beauty of our coast, we have surely come a long way from the fears of the 1960s that our coast would be ruined beyond redemption. Or have we? Vigilance remains essential. Passing a law does not mean that it is always implemented or upheld. The Devon and Dorset Wildlife Trusts fought a ten-year campaign to protect Lyme Bay from scallop dredging, which literally scrapes the ocean floor, removing not only live scallops but every other living thing, leaving a murky desert behind. A sixty-square-mile exclusion zone was finally agreed there in 2008, and there are now signs that the sea bed is recolonising. The National Trust has had to fight off damaging developments at Runkerry, next to the Giant’s Causeway, Ireland’s only World Heritage Site. In spite of the rigorous protection supposedly in place, consent was granted in 2012 for a resort and spa, including an eighteen-hole championship golf course, a 120-bedroom hotel and seventy-five houses. Fortunately the money did not materialise and it has not been built; many of us hope the application will not be revived because of the damage it would cause to this world-class site.
Sometimes, however, the simplest ideas work best and offer the clearest vision for the future. The most inspiring commitment in the Marine and Coastal Access Act is for a path to be created around the entire coast of England, following the precedent of the recently installed all-Wales Coastal Path. These ideas have their roots in the fight for beauty, inspired by Tom Stephenson’s Long Green Trail, the Pennine Way, which opened in 1965. There are already five coastal trails. The first three opened in the 1970s: the dramatic 186-mile Pembrokeshire Coast Long Distance Footpath, the Cleveland Way, more than half of whose 110 miles hugs the north Yorkshire coast, and the 630-mile South West Coast Path. The North Norfolk Coast Path and Peddar’s Way, which includes a fifty-mile coastal stretch, opened in 1986, and the all-Wales Coastal Path opened in 2012.
Creating these paths is not straightforward. The historic rights-of-way network was not designed for recreation, so access to and along the coast was very patchy, with many natural and human obstacles such as field boundaries, cliffs and rivers. Access is even more difficult if the land is intensively farmed and impossible where housing, urban or industrial developments block access to the sea. Routes have to be surveyed, landowners persuaded and signs and waymarking, stiles, bridges, gates and fencing put in place.
For a long time the farming and landowning bodies’ official view of coastal paths was negative. Coastal land was, for them, simply part of their business and they saw few advantages in letting people walk over it. Dogs, bikes and horses were even less popular. But as the coastal paths became better established and popular the mood changed. For the people walking them that is no surprise: the Pembrokeshire and South West paths are, in fact, the only way truly to appreciate these splendid coasts. And before long even sceptical farmers woke up to the opportunities to provide facilities for walkers: bed-and-breakfast accommodation, bunk-house barns, cafés and guided walks. And for every hardy soul walking the entire length of a path, there are hundreds using short lengths for local walks, attracted by good signposting, access to the sea and wonderful views. So local pubs, cafés and countless small businesses flourish because of the patronage of path users.
The all-Wales Coastal Path, seen here near Stackpole in Pembrokeshire. (Courtesy of the National Trust/John Millar)
The benefits of the all-Wales Coastal Path have been measured. The 870-mile-long path was begun in 2007 and completed in 2012 at a cost of £14.6 million. Using it, and the 182-mile-long Offa’s Dyke National Trail, it is now possible to walk the entire perimeter of Wales, the first country in the world that can make such a claim. In 2013 Natural Resources Wales calculated that the coast path had attracted 2.82 million visitors in the previous twelve months, bringing £32 million into the economy. In a single year, it had paid for its start-up costs twice over. Moreover the study found 5,400 tourism-related businesses within 2 km of the route and estimated that the new path had led to the creation of the equivalent of 112 new jobs. The ‘walking economy’, including a revival in local food products, is now an established part of the future of rural areas. Just as important, extraordinary experiences are now available to everyone: the sight of thousands of seabirds on Skomer and Skokholm, ospreys on the cliffs near Tremadoc, the chance to eat freshly caught crab and lobster, to enjoy the vast, glorious beaches of Gower, Cardigan Bay and the Llyn, and to glimpse seals and basking sharks in shallow waters. The entire diverse and beautiful coastline of Wales is accessible, creating and sealing a bond of affection that will not easily be broken.
The English Coastal Path, approved by Ministers in 2015, will bring similar benefits: physical and spiritual refreshment for people and a sustainable underpinning of the economy of remote and beautiful places. If its business case was all that mattered, it is unanswerable. But it is not all that matters, so we should be bolder. We should make more than a coast path, by designating a deep coastal zone where conservation, access and sustainable jobs are priorities, and where adaptation to change is positively encouraged. Within that zone, the coastline can evolve in the knowledge that it is providing a natural resource ‘bank’ for the nation.
Our coastline offers so much: outstanding wildlife and beautiful landscapes; inspiring experiences for people, benefiting their health and well-being; and places that can sustain thousands of small rural businesses, including in farming, fishing and tourism. We have saved our coastline, provided (or are developing) appropriate public access to it, and are making good progress on marine conservation: now let us harness its potential as a positive tool to help us manage the inevitable changes that climate change will bring. Our success in caring for the beauty of the coast shows how we can add immeasurably to the quality of our lives, ensure economic health and well-being, and bequeath places of great beauty to future generations.