On a stormy day in spring 2021, sea defenses washed away on the beach below Lucy Ansbro’s cliff-top home in Thorpeness, England. Then the end of her garden fell into the North Sea.
As she watched the plants fall over the edge, she feared her home in this seaside village 110 miles north-east of London would be next.
“We’ve lost ten feet of land,” said Ms. Ansbro, a 54-year-old television producer, sitting in her kitchen one morning. “Every time I went out, I didn’t know if the house would still be there when I came back.”
Coastal erosion is a natural process as waves pound beaches around the world, but on this stretch of England’s east coast stronger storms and bigger waves are scaring local residents like never before.
Thousands of homes here are threatened by the sea, and the government agencies tasked with defending them are doing their best to keep up. The Climate Change Committee, an independent body that advises the UK Environment Agency, has reported that 8,900 homes – 1,200 of them on stretches of coastline without protective structures – are at risk from coastal erosion. Without active coastal management, around 82,000 homes could be lost by 2105.
To stem the tide, the Environment Agency has pledged £5.2 billion (about US$6.5 billion) to build and realign 2,000 defenses – including seawalls made of stone, cement and steel – to protect communities from erosion and Floods could protect, albeit not forever.
But in some vulnerable coastal communities, homes are being left to nature’s mercy. Desperate homeowners in these areas face eviction and, worse, demolition of their own homes.
Ms Ansbro’s house, which she bought in 2010 for around £590,000, now stands 35ft from the cliff’s edge. After losing her garden, she applied to local East Suffolk Council and Environment Agency officials for permission to replace the lost gabions (metal cages filled with rocks) and sand-filled geobags with rock fill. The requests were granted, but that didn’t necessarily mean help was on the way.
In England, the cost of building naval defenses is shared between national and local authorities. At the national level, a funding calculator works out how much of this £5.2 billion budget is potentially available. It depends on whether “the benefits outweigh the costs,” based on an erosion schedule and four site-specific policy levels: Advance the Line, where new defenses extend the land area to the sea; Hold the line where new defenses maintain the existing shoreline; managed realignment, in which shoreline is allowed to erode but money is spent “to direct it to certain areas”; and No active intervention where no national funds are invested.
At the local level, municipalities and landowners have to make up the difference.
“In layman’s terms, the guidelines are labeled ‘defend,’ ‘withdraw,’ or ‘give up,'” said Angela Terry, CEO of One Home, a group that advocates for vulnerable homeowners.
Aware that policy for Thorpeness is a managed realignment and that the local council’s naval defense coffers were empty, Ms Ansbro did not expect support for her house. “I knew that if I didn’t raise the money myself, I would lose my home,” she said.
So she refinanced her London flat to pay for the construction of a 1,500-tonne granite fill to support the cliff beneath her property. It cost her almost £450,000 but the house still stands.
Her neighbors, she said, had not invested in protecting their property and were forced to vacate the house and then demolish it. “It was a shock to see it disappear,” Ms Ansbro said, looking at where the house had stood since the 1920s. “The community believes that the government should step in and pay for coastal defenses.”
This is not always possible. In a statement to The New York Times, a spokesman for the Environment Agency defended the tiered system of coastal aid, saying: “Protective measures may not be technically possible or affordable, or may be environmentally harmful.”
Where the coast cannot be defended, the British government is trying to help communities withdraw from the sea. Last year, as part of a wider £200million Floods and Coastal Innovation Scheme, £36million was made available to help residents of the two coastal counties with the highest erosion rates in England – East Riding of Yorkshire and North Norfolk – meet demolition costs move.
The five-year pilot program, which is still in the “preparatory phase”, aims to “work with coastal communities that cannot be sustainably protected against coastal erosion”. But not everyone there is grateful.
In the village of Skipsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Peter Garforth has lived in a brick house overlooking the beach from Green Lane for 23 years. When he bought the house he felt safe. Despite the lack of sea defenses, there was a road separating the end of his garden from the edge of the cliff, 185 feet away. He was amazed by “the best view in Yorkshire,” he said, and had made improvements to the property, which was built in 1985.
But then a cliff fall in 2009 caused the road and part of his garden to fall into the sea. It fell to Jane Evison, an East Riding of Yorkshire councilwoman, to explain the government’s no-active intervention policy to Mr Garforth. “It was difficult to get the message across,” Ms Evison said. “Most people really thought they were going to keep their home for the rest of their lives.”
The road was never repaired and the cliff is now approaching the 30-foot (9.36 m) minimum clearance from inhabited houses. Thanks to the new pilot scheme in his area, Mr Garforth, 78, is eligible for assistance that could help him finally move inland. However, he wants full funding for improved sea defenses to protect his community.
“We feel like we’re second-class citizens and don’t deserve it the way others do,” Garforth said. “Somehow the appetite to protect the coast has been lost.”
Most of them The remaining properties on Green Lane are now abandoned and destroyed. Some were sold for almost nothing in cash deals because banks won’t mortgage distressed properties. Insurance companies also do not offer insurance cover.
Still, the East Riding of Yorkshire Council is keeping a close eye on the houses on the beach. Every six months, aerial survey teams measure the distance between the verandas at the front of the Green Lane properties and the cliff edge.
“We don’t want a property to go over the edge while someone is in it or someone is on the beach,” said Richard Jackson, the city’s coastal redevelopment manager.
Mr Garforth is furious that the nearby hamlet of Mappleton is protected by two levees and a protective wall while his village is not. But there’s a reason: Route B1242, the main coastal road in the area, runs right through Mappleton, giving the hamlet hold-the-line status.
There are other reasons why defenses are not built along much of the coast. Some are eco-friendly. “The erosive sediment in the East Riding is important for flood protection in Lincolnshire,” Jackson said, referring to the county to the south. And, of course, “coastal defenses are expensive,” he said, pointing out that a riprap can cost £10,000 per meter to build.
Mr Garforth reckons he will have to leave home soon and when he does he wants to fight it. “If an eviction notice is posted on my door, I’ll take it to court,” he said.
Two hundred miles south at Hemsby, the shoreline was allowed to erode in accordance with the Managed Realignment policy. In March, five houses were demolished after storms ravaged the cliffs.
Noel Galer, Great Yarmouth Borough Councilor for Hemsby, said permission was recently granted for a 0.8-mile rock face. But paying for it will not be easy. The National Financing Calculator uses a formula based on the value of homes at risk of erosion over the next 25 years. “As the value of these houses is low, the Environment Agency could allocate £2million,” he said.
The council will have to figure out the rest. “We are now in the fundraising phase,” said Mr. Galer.
Coastal erosion has devastated English communities like Hemsby for centuries. In the 19th century Parliament was even deprived of a seat after half of the Borough of Dunwich was lost to the North Sea. The eastern cliffs are made of soft clay and gravel, and “as the clay gets wet it softens and erodes as a result,” said Stuart McLelland, co-director of the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull.
Climate change increases risks for homeowners as “rising sea levels make beaches smaller and increasing storms cause bigger waves,” said Dr. McLelland.
Many coastal residents are selling their homes while they can. A recent search on Britain’s largest property portal, Zoopla, found 81 properties for sale in the village of Hemsby. Prices range from £26,000 for a two bedroom bungalow to £600,000 for a five bedroom villa.
The properties are predominantly “cash purchases only,” said Bradley Stark, senior real estate adviser at Minors & Brady Estate Agents, which lists two properties in Hemsby at risk.
“We’re trying not to scare customers away but we have to give honest feedback about the area,” said Mr Stark, whose company last sold a two-bedroom house a mile from Hemsby on the coast for £300,000 in cash last month.
East Riding councilwoman Ms Evison warned that people who bought coastal properties after 2009 will not be eligible for assistance under the new pilot scheme. Still, for some home seekers, a property on an unstable cliff can be an attractive option – at the right price.
Last October, Helen Vine jumped at the chance to buy the Sellwood Arms pub, which sits near the cliffs in the village of Aldbrough, 12 miles south of Mr Garforth’s house and is subject to the same No Active Intervention policy. The pub is only about 215 feet from where the high street plunged into the sea six years ago. With beamed ceilings and a four-bedroom first-floor flat where Ms Vine, 51, now lives with her family, the pub was a steal at just over £100,000. On the walls are sepia photos of village monuments that have fallen victim to the sea over the decades. But she remains undaunted.
“I couldn’t have afforded a place like this anywhere else,” she said.
Ms. Vine renovated the upstairs rooms without, she joked, exaggerating the expense. The plan is to recoup their investment (and maybe more) before it’s forced to demolish — hopefully not in the next few decades.
“It’s a risk,” she said.