“WHERE we’re standing could be gone by next week,” says John Fell-Clark as we look out to sea from his disappearing stretch of Suffolk coast. Behind us is the monolithic Martello Tower that Fell-Clark converted into a home 20 years ago. “I don’t know whether it will survive the winter,” he says.
This is a tale of erosion — erosion of the coastline, and erosion of faith in the government bodies that are supposed to protect our homes. Martello Tower W was 40m (144ft) from the sea when Fell-Clark bought it in 1985. Now the 3,000-tonne structure, built to defend the coast during the Napoleonic wars, is one big storm away from crashing into the sea. But the Government says it has no money to pay for protection. And, under English property law, if his tower does collapse Fell-Clark will have to clean up the mess — 750,000 shattered bricks — himself.
Britain has always had a rapidly changing coastline, but since the turn of the century entire communities, such as the Norfolk village of Happisburgh and Birling Gap, a hamlet near Beachy Head, East Sussex, have been devastated by erosion. The real culprit, experts are muttering, is government policy. They say that protecting coastal homes is no longer seen as a priority because there are more people — and votes — at risk from inland flooding.
In the case of Martello Tower W, the problem can be traced to a decision in the 1980s to stop maintaining the wooden groynes that prevented strong tides from sweeping away shingle beaches. In 1995 the decaying groynes were removed entirely. Next winter one of the worst storms on record swept the shingle miles away, exposing the clay cliff face behind it.
Since then Fell-Clark has campaigned tirelessly for new coastal defences as the waves have crept closer. His local authority has paid for temporary measures, but the erosion has gathered pace. Last year the artist Bettina Furnée planted rows of flags heading inland from the eroding cliffs by Tower W. In just eight months every flag had fallen, marking 14 metres of erosion. Furnée turned the government-funded art project into a video on www.youtube.com (to find it, search under “Bawdsey”). Soon after the last flag fell, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it had no money for coastal defence work until 2008.
Fell-Clark never imagined what lay in store when in 1985 he combed the Suffolk coast for a second home. His work is converting unusual properties, so he wasn’t daunted when he came upon Martello Tower W near Bawdsey village. “I liked the minimalist appearance from the outside,” he recalls. Inside was nothing but decay and 2ft of water. “But it was extremely atmospheric. You could see amazing potential .”
Like its neighbours, three of which are visible along the coast, the tower was erected in 1809 to guard against invasion by Napoleon. Once the French threat passed, Tower W was used as a vantage point for detecting smugglers, then during the Second World War it hosted antiaircraft guns. After 1945 it sat glumly abandoned, Grade II listed but otherwise ignored. Fell-Clark persuaded English Heritage that his involvement would benefit the tower, then privately negotiated its purchase from the local landowner. He spent months pumping out rainwater, drying bricks and sealing cracks.
There are two floors inside these giant drums. In Fell-Clark’s conversion, the ground floor, once a weapons store, became two bedrooms, a shower room and a bathroom. The first floor is an open-plan living room and kitchen. Electric underfloor heating and a large open fireplace mean the tower puts up a sturdy defence against North Sea winters. “It was magic,” says Fell-Clark, who recalls happy weekends with his wife and two daughters. “We’d drive up from London on a Friday night. I’d light the fire and open a bottle of whisky.” Today there’s a ten-metre stretch of soft mud between the tower and sea. But that belies the grim prognosis from the engineers: given the sheer weight of this elephantine structure — built, after all, to withstand cannon-balls — two more metres of erosion will make the coast too weak to support it.
In a cruel irony, when you stand on the roof of Tower W your view immediately to the north is of a huge coastal protection scheme. A fleet of heavy-duty vehicles is lowering 18,000 tonnes of rock onto the beach, so that the sea cannot touch the cliff face. Why isn’t that happening here? It turns out that the stretch of coast ending a few dozen metres north of Tower W is governed by the Environment Agency because the land is slightly lower; technically, it’s a flood-plain. “It is a bit arbitrary,” says Rod Hicks, project manager at the Environment Agency. “The tower is at risk from coastal erosion, but not from flooding, so it’s not part of our remit.”
Fell-Clark’s stretch is the responsibility of Suffolk Coastal District Council, which relies on Defra for funding. Defra initially said Tower W did not qualify for protection under its convoluted scoring system. Then English Heritage, which emphasises that it is not a coastal protection agency, found an ingenious loophole, arguing that the cost of dismantling and rebuilding this national monument would be £5 million. Defra requires the asset being saved to be worth more than the cost of the work. As coastal defence would cost about £1.5 million, funding should have been secured. But Defra had already allocated all its funds. It is, says Andy Smith, Suffolk Coastal District Council’s deputy leader, “rapidly becoming a nightmare”. The issue was not just protecting Tower W: the East Lane promontory, on which the tower sits, ha d been identified as crucial to protecting a far greater stretch of coast. If they don’t “hold the line” here, other coastal homes will be at risk. “It’s becoming clear that the Government is deciding not to defend the coast,” says Smith.
Locals have taken matters into their own hands, forming the East Lane Trust, through which landowners can donate sections of agricultural land to the council, which will redesignate it and sell it to property developers, the profits going to coastal defence. But the trust may not raise enough money in time.
The alternative is a nasty clean-up bill. The law states that if your land becomes beach (in other words is covered by high tide) it is Crown property. Thus the minute Tower W falls into the sea, it becomes an enormous act of fly- tipping. Fell-Clark has spent £200,000 on the tower. He planned to retire there. “I am absolutely furious,” he says. “When we bought the tower, we believed defence of the shoreline would continue.” We look out once more over the shrinking coast. “Imagine another 15 metres of grass, then shingle that sloped off into the water,” he says sadly. “It was stunning.”
Deep waters
LORNA BLACKWOOD
