The England Coast Path: Between Land and Sea
Britain’s coastline is currently in the spotlight because of ongoing controversies about sewage release around the country’s shores. Given the special place that the country’s edgelands play in the making and reinforcement of national identity in a land mythologised as an ‘island nation’ (particularly in England), it seems a good time to examine the nature and meaning of where the land meets the sea – and the routes around it.
Old Harry Rocks, Dorset | Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash
Mapping the Coast and Creating the Path
As the project to build an England Coast Path nears completion, it is important to recognise that beach, shoreline, and cliffs are mapped, imagined, brought to mind, and managed in human lives much more than they are immutable, fixed, physical, and ‘natural’ landscapes.
The Coast Path itself serves as a tangible representation of our desire to navigate, explore, and connect with the coastal landscape. As we walk the coastline, we traverse a landscape that has been shaped by human intervention, where cliffs have been reinforced, beaches sometimes built or more usually protected, and access points carefully designed. The area covered by the England Coast Path itself has been meticulously mapped, shaped, and managed to provide access between the ever-shifting boundary of land and sea. The legislation upon which it rests, however, depends on the concept of a ‘coastal margin’ within which visitors enjoy a new right of access, and which can allow that access to roll back as the coast retreats.
However, this point extends beyond the Coast Path. Britain’s coasts are intensively managed landscapes, a trend that intensified in the second half of the twentieth century as demands for flood barriers and Cold War defences grew.
Coastal Erosion
However, amidst the beauty and significance of the England Coast Path, there looms a sobering reality: coastal erosion. Alarming rates of erosion have led to the loss of homes, especially along the east coast, where one to four metres of land is lost to sea each year. This phenomenon is not new; entire villages have been lost off the coast of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Indeed, one can view the movement of the coastline by reference to the National Library of Scotland’s overlay maps. You can move the transparency in the bottom left on that page, if you want to see how much land has worn away since the late Victorian and Edwardian period.
Coastline erosion in Hollym, East Riding of Yorkshire. In just three years, the coastline retreated dramatically between March 2003 (red) and March 2006 (green). As you can see, this pattern has only continued. | ArcGIS East Riding of Yorkshire
Coastal Projects
Determining the exact coastline has often been a contentious issue. Following the devastating 1953 floods along England's east coast, the central government discovered that various bodies responsible for coastal defences, such as River Boards, local authorities, the War Office, and the Admiralty - to name but a few - often knew little about the coastal defences for which they were responsible. Recognising the need for comprehensive information, a Cold War project named ‘Operation Sandstone’ was mounted between 1946 and the mid-1960s. This long-lasting project endeavoured to map every part of the country’s coasts, all the better to resist a Soviet invasion or assist the Americans in mounting a counter-invasion.
To those surveys was added a National Trust project that ran in 1964, in which University of Reading students led by a geography lecturer named John Whittow looked at land use along Britain’s coastline. They found much of this territory ‘pristine’, ‘unspoilt’, or ‘pleasant’: but elsewhere, unplanned building and the detritus of war blotted the landscape. Unexploded ordnance littered Orford Ness in Suffolk; the Great Orme in North Wales was spoilt by derelict gun emplacements. Their work stimulated the Trust’s Neptune Campaign, which tried to buy up as much of the coastline as it could – with great success.
Climate Change and Coastal Management
Climate change and the global heating emergency are expected to amplify the demands and dilemmas faced by coastal areas in the twenty-first century. It has been clear for many years that local authority, housing, and transport planning are going to have to give back increasing amounts of land to the sea. The Government’s 2004 strategy for this managed retreat was even called Making Space for Water.
After widespread flooding in 2007 Sir Michael Pitt, later chair of the Government’s Infrastructure Planning Commission, was appointed to investigate coastal issues. He again recommended a sensitive, pragmatic approach that accepted a shift towards adaptation and mitigation – as well as increased use of more organic and integrated ‘natural’ approaches, instead of relying on simple concrete or metal barriers.
The England Coast Path in Tintagel, Cornwall | Photo by Crispin Jones on Unsplash
These are ‘liminal’ areas: in-between spaces that are neither quite land or water, not quite under human control but not totally fluid either. The line between those two spaces moves, and is likely to move more quickly in the years to come. Coasts and shorelines are indeed partly interesting to scholars for their restless, unceasingly altered nature: there is even a new journal, Coastal Studies and Society, dedicated to this subject.
As the landscape is transformed, coastal access must evolve accordingly, a fact that makes the creation of a narrow but significant new type of ‘open space’ entirely appropriate. In many ways, the England Coast Path symbolises a Right to Roam at the land's edges - literally as well as legally, on the coastal margin - compensating for the omission of the foreshore in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. Questions of who has the right to go where are to a certain extent dynamic. Having granted a series of rights, they continue to expand – but gradually, in a piecemeal manner.
In some ways, policy is perhaps unconsciously mapping itself onto reality: the England Coast Path is something of an access zone, not a path or track, that will move with the shore and sea. That seems a fitting outcome for an intensely observed zone that not only remains, but seems more and more, unstable and uncertain. Walking the coast path, no less than walking through England’s suburbs or exurbs, must be brought to the centre of our story, rather than being relegated to its borders.